Not Broken
by DarkClerk
Summary: Sequel to Not Like Bobby . . . RoguePyro as Rogue waits for the cure for mutation in XMen 3.
1. Chapter 1

Authors' Note: This is the sequel to "Not Like Bobby . . ." –you know, the one I said I didn't intend to write? Well, everyone's feedback was so positive and the Pyro scenes in X-Men 3 so disappointing (what a waste of Aaron Stanford) I just couldn't help myself. This scene is my dream of what should have been- when Rogue waits in line to receive the cure for mutation.

Disclaimer (delivered in haiku): I own nothing here,

No character, no plot line

Thanks to the big men.

Not Broken- 

Rogue waited in line, suspended between mutants she assumed were as desperate and broken as she was, as she was suspended somewhere between hope and despair. She stared at the back of the enormous man in front of her, her arms crossed tightly against her stomach. She couldn't hear the shouts from the crowd, couldn't feel the occasional sprinkling of rain from the dark clouds overhead. In an hour she could be free. The thought made her shake and tremble.

There was a motion at her back, a stirring of air.

"I always knew Bobby was a coward but I thought you at least had some guts." The voice was in her ear, all of a sudden, so close it might have been coming from inside her own head. But Rogues' thoughts had ever been articulated in that hot snarl.

She turned slowly in the line, brushing her hand against the wall, hoping irrationally that the touch of cool indifferent stone might help steady her. But Rogue was wearing her gloves and all she felt under her palm was the texture of the blocks- they were almost as rough as the beat of her heart. When she opened her eyes she found herself nose to nose with John, once again close enough to feel the fever under his skin. Normally being suddenly so near to someone would have Rogue scrambling desperately to move away but on one side of her was the wall, at her back was another mutant, and she wouldn't step out of line. She wouldn't.

"What are you doing here, John?" She demanded, lifting her chin stubbornly.

When she dared to look into his face she could see something had changed about him. John was standing ramrod straight, legs apart, like a solider Gone was that aggressive indifference he must have practice to get it so perfect. Gone too was his ever present lighter.

He had not let go of his rage though. Rogue could almost smell it, coiling around him like campfire smoke.

"Looking for traitors." He answered, glaring down at her

"I don't see any mirrors around here." Rogue snapped back. She wouldn't apologize for her choice. She wouldn't let him make her ashamed.

"I'm not the one standing in line waiting to join the other side-"

"Don't- don't you dare! You have no idea what it's like- to never touch-"

"You touched me."

It was true.

And they were standing close enough that they were almost touching again.

She couldn't let him confuse her._ She wouldn't get out of the line_. Ignoring the ghostly memory of his lips on hers and the cinnamon smell of his anger, Rogue looked up at him, straight into his eyes, "So what?" She asked deliberately.

His recoil was so brief- as fast as the flicker of a flame- she might have missed it. But looking up into his eyes- having been behind his eyes once- she saw it clearly.

And because she had hurt him, he would hurt her back.

"Do you think this'll change things between you?" He mocked, putting one hand flat on the stones about her left shoulder, pinning her in place. The line moved around them, creating a wall between them and the view of the crowd. Sunk as they were in their own battles and desperate hopes, the other mutants ignored them. Pyro and Rogue barely registered except as an obstacle to be avoided.

"Do you think he'll love you the way you want him to now? That maybe if he can touch you, he'll need you?" He wouldn't break their eye contact, trapping Rogue with his gaze and his body positioned to prevent escape. Even when he reached over with his other hand to toy with the edge of her jacket and his fingers grazed dangerously close to the skin of her neck, he wouldn't let go of her eyes "Maybe he'll be hot instead of cold-" The old sneer was creeping back into his voice.

"It's not about that-" The rough stone was digging into her shoulder blades, pressing hard enough to bruise but it didn't seem as intrusive as Pyros' gaze. "This is for me." She insisted.

"_No_." He rejected her words fiercely, "_This is_ you." He leaned in and brushed his lips against the side of her neck, where his fingers had cleared a little patch of milky skin. The kiss was fleeting but she could still feel it- the fire that was John washing over her, engulfing her like a wave.

Her breath caught on a sound somewhere between a sob and a sigh. It was wrong to want this- which was perhaps the reason she needed so desperately to get rid of it- to rid herself of the temptation. What she had never confessed to anyone was that sometimes she felt a longing to use her power, to reach out and drink the essence of people in great rushing heady gulps. The desire could be nearly overwhelming. Like now. John was still bent over her, his breath stirring the hair against her neck but she felt like she was swallowing him. Her mouth was full and heavy with the taste of it- the burning that was equal parts pain and beauty- that was John.

He glanced upward at the sound she made before deliberately lowering his mouth again. This time it rested against her jawbone. Her eyes fell shut. It had been so long- no one had touched her in so long. Not since he had.

"John-" Rogue didn't know if she was begging him to stop or to keep going. She was gripping the lapels of his jacket, poised on a knifes' edge to push him away or pull him closer.

He slid his fingers into her hair, his fingertips resting against the warm secret hollow where skull meets neck. Her power was pulling at him but he felt no pain, only a hot caressing sensation like fire over and just below his skin. It didn't feel like an invasion. It felt like intimacy.

John was trembling, desperate for more and only frightened by his desperation. This was the only thing he missed. The only thing he regretted leaving behind.

He moved slowly, to prove to himself that he could, that he had not completely lost control. It seemed to take years for him to lower his mouth to hers, to lean his body against her body. The sensations from this moment of contact hit him from all sides at once- her sweet soft mouth, her sweet soft warm body, her fear and desire and the old war between them. _John_, her blood sang. _John_, her lips shaped against his before opening to him. He slid an arm around her waist and took all that she offered.

When they parted finally, John leaned his forehead against hers and Rogue could feel his breath moving gently across her eyes. She could hear the rushing rivers of his blood, feel his heart pounding against his breastbone . . . or was it her heart? It was so good, so sweet- that little connection and she left her eyes shut so she could enjoy it just a moment longer.

"You're not broken." She heard him whisper and one of them took a fluttery uncertain breath.

Maybe he was right.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N**- I've been a-wrasslin' this chap forever it seems, until it has completely stopped making sense to me at which point I decided to throw it at you lovely people. Please forgive me. P.S. Thanks for all the feedback thus far. I truly appreciate it.

**Chap. 2-**

Rogue opened her eyes . . . and saw the blue veins standing in sharp contrast against the skin of Johns' face gone pale.

No.

She reached out instinctively to touch him and recoiled at the sight of her own gloved fingers.

"Rogue-" John warned, reaching out to grab her hands between his own.

"Let go!" She commanded desperately, "Let me go!" She pulled hard away from him and still weak from her kiss, Pyro felt her fingers slip away. The tears had begun to spill over and slide down her face.

He fell back against the wall; his knees loose and wobbly like jell-o, "Damn it!" He hissed and he thumped the stone weakly with one fist, feeling her run away from him like there was a thread stretching taut between them.

He chased her as best he could for three blocks. He was shaky and uncertain on his feet but it was impossible for him to lose her. John could sense her quite clearly; her heartbeat the twin of his own and calling to him.

He caught up with her in a blind alleyway, from which there was only one way out and that was behind him.

When Rogue saw the wall blocking her path, she turned with the wild look of a cornered animal, "Just leave me alone-" She pleaded with him, looking beyond him at the brighter light of the open street at his back. Her voice was unsteady- she looked capable of anything.

A wiser- or at least a more cautious person would have done as she asked but John just kept advancing; one slow deliberate step after another.

"_Why won't you just let me go_?" She screamed suddenly, bent almost double in desperation and pain.

John was only a few feet away, now.

In trying to back away from him Rogue stumbled, falling against the dirty wall. Her face was still wet. The curtain of her hair had caught on her tears and her eyelashes. Instead of pushing it away and facing him though, she hid behind it. She looked so small and . . . beaten.

And suddenly Pyro was furious.

His anger propelled him across the last few feet that separated them, "That's what Bobby would do, right?" He hissed, standing almost on top of her, "Give you space? _Walk away_?" He hauled Rogue up by the arm, pushing her against the wall. "_Stop acting like you're broken_." He commanded, shaking her a little.

That seemed to rouse her. She shoved him back- but he was ready for that- and she only managed to push him off balance for a second. Pyro was back on her in an eyeblink, closer than before. He pressed his chest against hers, their hip bones skittering than settling tight together. They were pressed so close they had to breathe together or not at all.

"Did I ever tell you," John asked, reaching down and gripping her by the right forearm to force her hand up, "how long it took me to learn to control my power?"

She struggled, wrestling to get out of his grasp but he was implacable and no matter what she did he wouldn't let go.

"It took years." He told her; his voice shaking with anger, though the movements of his hands were tightly controlled as he pushed the sleeve of her coat up to reveal the upper edge of her glove, nestled in the crook of her elbow, "I was only ten when it happened. For a long time, I could only make the fire obey me when I was pissed or scared."

Rogue watched his work silently with wide eyes. She had given up fighting him for the moment, the anger draining out of her to be replaced by something else. Instead she stared at the hand he held between them, numb or fascinated or horrified. It was hard to tell which.

"It was the same for Bobby- and Kitty- and Jubilee." He told her as he rolled the glove down inch by inch. He continued to move slowly, making sure he didn't graze bare skin, "It was the same for everybody. But not you." His voice took on a sarcastic edge, his tightly reined soldier's anger coming loose. "You're _special_, right? Why should you have to work for it? It should just come naturally."

The raw delicate bone of her wrist came into view and they both stared at it for a second, mesmerized like they were looking at a bright sudden star.

"I never thought-" Rogue roused herself a little.

But Pyro interrupted as though he had not heard her protest, "I worked at it everyday for years- _learning_ fire." The cloud-pale skin of her palm emerged between them, "I would put my hand in it just to understand what burning was."

He peeled the material away from her fingers and was momentarily silent, his anger briefly forgotten. The motion felt as intimate as sliding her panties off- or what he had always imagined it would feel like and he had to repress the urge to kiss the palm of her hand, to take her slender fingers into his mouth.

The glove dropped from his hand onto the ground, crumpled and discarded like trash and he stared down at her, tilting his head so his hungry eyes could grab hers. Eventually she raised her own head from where she watched the empty glove with a mixture of horror and wonder. He held her gaze for a long moment.

"What are you doing?" She whispered, finally.

"Giving you your first lesson." He explained in a soft grim voice, "If you don't want to hurt me- then don't hurt me."

And he pressed her palm against his cheek.

The drain began almost immediately; the veins under his skin rushing up to meet her touch as though they had been waiting for just this moment. They both gasped and in panic, Rogue tried once more to fight him but he wasn't weak enough yet to let her go. John held on grimly, almost grinding her hand into his skin. The pad of her first finger pressed into the soft place just below his eye. Her ring finger came close to sliding into his ear. On his neck, just below his jaw, her pinky rose and fell with his pulse.

"_John_-" She begged desperately as his energy began to pour over. Her head fell back against the brick as she tried vainly to put some space between them in a place where no space was possible. In the back of her mind, where the panic had yet to reach, she realized she was always trying to put space between them.

"Not easy, is it?" He ground through clenched teeth.

Rogue hardly heard him. But she could see him- she _was_ him, feeling the fire and the potential for fire in all the things around them. She knew her coat was more flammable than her jeans, knew that the gel in John's hair would burn when it got just _so_ hot. There was a pile of oily rags next to the dumpster behind them that was on the edge of becoming fire.

She had to get control. Rogue worked desperately, scrambling to build walls and barriers in her head- anything to keep him on the outside.

Johns' forehead floated down to rest against her shoulder, though still he kept her hand pressed to his cheek. His lips brushed against her neck, shaping words she couldn't understand but could feel against her skin.

Oh, god. What if he died? What if he died because she wasn't strong enough?

But there was so much to hold back. It wasn't just the power of his mutation to fight- that was wrapped tight around his own energy, the fiery content of John's soul and it all came blasting at her with the wild force of a geyser. And there were memories too, riding the incoming tide to swirl around her head.

_He burned his house to the ground. Thirteen years old- and he stood in front of the blazing remnants of the trailer he had shared with his father. The fire was so big it lit up the sky for miles. Even the fire department had given up fighting it. And John stood all alone in the cold darkness and stared into the fire- stared into the fire to make sure it stayed hot._

John slumped a little more, his greater weight pinning her against the wall. The hand gripping her own was squeezing so tightly Rogue might have noticed her bones creaking and complaining- if she had been capable of noting anything but the battle she was in.

The girl pushed frantically back against the flow but the more she struggled the less control she seemed to have. As though her power were a beast that fought and clawed harder in response to her terror. She heard John groan against her skin.

Struggling didn't work but she was too afraid to just give in- _she couldn't_.

So instead she tried to just stand. Taking a deep unsteady breath, she made the terrifying decision to stop fighting; holding herself just stiff enough to stay upright- to hold against the tide.

John stirred a little and let her hand slip from his. He still wouldn't move away, though. "Better." He observed in a soft hoarse voice as he nuzzled her ear, his warm breath sliding in and out of her hair. With his free hand, he parted the edges of her coat and pushed her shirt back a little to caress the skin of her stomach.

Rogue was suddenly too weary to reply. Everything had become at once close-up and far away like in a dream. She imagined herself as an ancient rock, sitting patiently against the wash of the ocean and anchored herself in his touch to help her keep standing in the flow. Johns' hands when they slipped over her skin were real, she knew, as real as his power pulling and pushing at her.

"His name was Jasper." She heard John whisper, pausing his roving lips as they brushed her collar bone.

"What?" She murmured absently and their lips came together briefly.

"The first boy you ever kissed."

"What?" Rogue repeated, taking his head in her hands again to feel the texture of his skin against her skin, to feel like she had some control over what was happening to her. She put her hand back against his cheek and felt it slide into place like a puzzle piece. It was getting a little easier. She was learning the ebb and flow of the tide, "How do you know that?"

"I can see him." John explained, giving her a sweet sideways smile when she met his eyes. The blue veins that she had come to fear and hate so much still crossed his face but she couldn't seem to mind this time. They were just the mark of her touch, like the perfect pink ovals he had left on her arms, proof that she meant enough to him to lose control.

"He's the first one you ever touched."

When his words became clear to her, Rogue stopped cold, feeling a sharp stab of alarm. John gasped and his hand convulsed where it caressed her side.

"You can see that?" She demanded, tightening her grip unintentionally.

"Yeah. Rogue-" Reaching up, he gripped the hand still pressed against his cheek.

"What else did you see?" Her voice was thinning out, becoming strangled, "What else-"

"Ahhh," A small pained grunt escaped from him, "Rogue, you have to-" Pyro fell to his knees.

Rogue was staring at him in utter horror but she couldn't seem to let go. The lines on his face had regained their ugliness. She imagined she could see them sucking the life out of him. He was begging her with his eyes to gain control, to stop hurting him but she didn't know how. It was all going wrong again.

"Rogue-" John tried one more time. His hand reached out toward her just before he passed out; slipping from under her fingers, "Rogue-"


	3. Chapter 3

Dedication: For Randa Beth, who had the guts to call me on a mistake and to everyone who begged me for more, more, more. I appreciate every little push. Thanks guys!

**Chap. 3-**

John woke up, aching and alone on the dirty cement of the alleyway.

"The first thing you have to understand," he instructed the empty air caustically, struggling to his feet, "is that it's not always easy or fun to learn."

Of course, some people never learned at all- like he couldn't seem to learn. How many chances had he given her? He tried for a second to count them all- at the campsite when he had kissed her- _"I wouldn't have waited_", leaving the jet at Alkali Lake- "_You always do what you're told?"_, finding her in that line- "_You're not broken_", and all those innumerable moments at the school when he had waited and watched while she turned away from him toward Bobby.

Seems like he was always standing in front of her, waiting for her to see him.

"_Ahhh!"_ With a furious cry, Pyro turned, punching the nearby dumpster with a lance of fire that sent it shooting toward the sky to fall back to earth in a twisted heap of charred metal.

He left the fire burning and screaming like a trapped monster behind him and stalked out of the alley. The light reduced him to a black shape against brightness, something hardly human. But it was pale next to his own rage.

He wasn't angry for what he had done- regret was for the weak. But he was angry at himself for what he had _hoped_.

He wouldn't wait for her anymore, he promised himself. He wouldn't run after her, argue with her, try to force her to see the truth. Not anymore.

She was broken.

It didn't matter. He still had a job to do. Pyro stalked his way down the streets, back toward the clinic. He couldn't feel her anymore, not like before. The absence of her presence tugged at him worse than the knowledge of her had. In the pocket of his jacket, his fist worked, tightening and loosening, tightening and loosening.

The sidewalk became increasingly crowded as he approached the clinic but John didn't have much trouble making his way along - he wasn't big, would never be but Magnetos' air of ruthless power was starting to wear off on him. People moved out of his way, often not realizing it but acting instinctively. On another day, he might have found it amusing, even a little satisfying. Today, he hardly noticed.

The crowd slipped aside suddenly and Pyro caught sight of something familiar- a set of shoulders held so stiffly you could use them to level wet concrete.

When his eyes fell on Bobby the first thing John thought- the very first thing- was that Bobby was there for Rogue. That she had gone running back to him, to safe predictable _Bobby_, reducing what had happened between them to nothing. The thought produced a wave of fury Pyro could feel to his finger tips. His hand opened, fingers spreading wide in anticipation of the fireball he could be holding, that he suddenly longed to hold.

His brain caught up with his eyes before he snapped the flint into life. Bobby was alone, Rogue nowhere to be seen. Though Bobby was obviously looking for her, straining against the crowd and stretching onto his toes to peer at the line winding into the clinic.

John approached Bobby silently, stepping out of the crowd towards him just as the young man began walking away.

"Getting the cure so you can go back home to mommy and daddy?" The thought of Bobby's perfect little house, waiting for him in Boston like some kind of fucking monument infuriated John. The urge to fill his fist with fire and shove it through Bobbys' face was almost overwhelming.

"I'm looking for someone." Barely glancing at him, Bobby answered with perfect calm, as though Pyro was no threat, as though they were not enemies now.

Bobbys' lack of fear sharpened his tone even more, made him want to go for the jugular just to watch Bobby bleed.

"Oh, I get it. Your _girlfriend_." The word twisted almost beyond recognition in Johns' mouth. "Figures she'd want the cure." Cowards and traitors, he insisted to himself - all of them- but especially her, so desperate to embrace mediocrity she would mutilate who she was, "She's _pathetic_."

That got a rise. John could see Bobbys' hand tighten into a fist, frost forming on his knuckles and he almost laughed. It was about time. He knew Bobby couldn't stay wound that tight forever.

"C'mon, Ice man, make a move." He taunted.

To Pyros' disappointment, Bobby didn't rise to the bait. Though he wasn't really surprised. No way Bobby would start a fight here where some _innocent_ person might get hurt.

"She just wants what anyone would want." Bobby said tightly, turning to walk away, turning to be the better person.

This little proclamation was more than John could take. Was Bobby trying to tell _him_ about Rogue? Johns' voice reached out like a hand; it grabbed Bobby roughly, forcing him to stay in place.

"You think you know her?" John asked, sharp and mocking, as he watched Bobby with eyes that suddenly noticed far too much, "You've got her wrapped up in this little fairy tale in your head- you think she's some princess in a tower, waiting to get saved?"

Seeing the answer, Pyro shook his head and laughed at Bobbys' blindness, "Hell, man. She's the _dragon_."

Bobby was looking at him like he was foaming-at-the-mouth crazy which only made Pyro laugh harder, "You don't know a damn thing about her." He gasped.

"And you do?" Bobby demanded.

John nodded weakly through his laughter. "We're just the same. Her and me." He insisted. Bobby's lip curled and Pyro switched back to serious suddenly, the contempt surfacing in his eyes again, "We're not people, Bobby. We're something else- something _better_. Your problem is you're too weak to see it."

"No," Bobby disagreed, "We're human- our powers don't change that."

"They changed it," John jerked his head toward the clinic, his voice flattening with anger once more, "They call us a _disease_. They want to _exterminate_ us and you think we should try to play nice?" He shook his head in disgust, "Same old Bobby . . . still afraid of a fight." _That's why you don't deserve her- you don't have the balls to fight for her, _he thought.

But Bobby was already turning away from him again, refusing to listen. Refusing to see.

Pyro smiled at his retreating back, showing teeth. Bobby would see this.

With a sharp snap of his arm, the clinic exploded into flame.

All diseases had ways of fighting back.


	4. Chapter 4

A/N: Normally, I would update very slowly, extracting the maximum amount of worship from you guys, 'cause I'm needy like that but somehow it was just flowing this time. This is entirely a fluke! Please don't get used to it.

**Chap. 4-**

Rogue is sitting on his bed.

It feels like a lifetime since he has seen her last, though it has only been- what? Five days. Not even a whole week. And he already feels like he is looking at a different person, is looking out of the eyes of a different person.

Uncertain, Bobby steps forward carefully, as she waits patiently on his quilt. He stops cold when he sees her hands. She is staring down at them, her naked hands, pale and soft as the undersides of birds' wings.

She did it, Bobby thinks blankly- no more Rogue, only Marie.

He's usually good in intense moments. He knows how to reassure, how to listen, how to float on a sea of drama but never drown in it. He is a _nice_ guy. But he has no roadmap for this.

She looks up at him as he approaches, not appealing or eager, just . . . looking. It's the expression Bobby has come to find so disconcerting since that day, months and months ago when he had finally thrown caution to the winds and kissed her. His impulse had gotten him a headache and this look. This look that doesn't indicate that she can read his mind; it is more that somehow, _without_ looking she knows exactly what is going on in his head.

He glances at her and then away, eyes sliding off her like water from a shower curtain and he says the first thing that occurs to him before she can say it for him, "I never wanted this."

"It's what I want." She stands suddenly but doesn't move toward him. Instead she crosses the room away from him to stand by the window. There is a heavy moment of silence Bobby doesn't know how to fill. He can't put his disappointment into words- he has no right to.

Rogue fills the quiet for him. Gazing down into the yard at something he can't see, she tells him softly, "I'm sorry I couldn't be with you- at Alcatraz. I'm glad you're all alright."

Bobby takes one step farther inside.

Alcatraz.

No one ever talks about what happens after a battle- how victory has all the substance of a soap bubble as you limp off the field littered with the bodies of people who can have no allegiance to anything anymore. No one mentions the displacement and absolute loneliness that drags at you when the great task is done or that the ride home is a silent dream in which, no matter how hard you reach, you can't seem to touch anyone. No one ever warns you how that first night after the fight, even under the weight of the worst exhaustion of your life you don't sleep well.

It takes days, sometimes weeks to remember how to sleep again.

For a second, it's easier to look at her than the memories. She is still gazing out the window but at least she's not telling him to be quiet and there have been all these _things_ pressing on him for what feels like years.

"John was there, at Alcatraz." Bobby states, glancing around at the room they used to share. The walls above what used to be Johns' bed are blank- they were always blank- even when he lived there. Looking back, Bobby doesn't think it was because Pyro didn't have interests- because he sure as hell had opinions. It was more like John somehow knew that he wasn't staying and so he never bothered to make the room anything more than a box for sleeping in. And he didn't like to reveal too much. John- _Pyro_ had told Bobby that he never really knew Rogue. Maybe Bobby never really knew John.

Maries' silence continues to draw at Bobby, pulling his eyes to her again. There's something in the fragile set of her shoulders that tells him she might understand . . . and who else does he have to make his confession to?

"We fought," He admits, dropping the words into the empty space between them, "I . . . changed. And I hit him, left him there. I don't know if he's alive or dead."

"He's alive." Rogue says it in a voice of such weary certainty Bobby actually keeps his eyes on her. The tone of her voice is at odds with the stiff brittle curve of her neck.

"How can you be so sure?" He asks.

Showing him the whole of her face for the first time, she wears an uncharacteristically dry smile, "I touched him." She answers simply. "I know."

Bobby is frowning at her outright now, a small line creasing the skin right between his eyebrows. "That day-" He says, studying her carefully, "I came looking for you at the clinic- I ran into John instead. He told me- he said that I didn't really know you."

She shrugs with one shoulder, noncommittal.

Something occurs to Bobby, "Wait- how could you know he's alive? You took the-"

Rogue is on him suddenly, crossing the space between them almost instantly, one hand outstretched towards him.

And Bobby reacts automatically, stepping sharply back away from her.

They both freeze.

Rogues' hand is suspended between them, hanging in the air from invisible strings until finally she lets it fall. The strange smile is back on her face, this time painted over with bitterness.

Moving with deliberate slowness, she steps over to her coat and reaching into the pocket pulls out one glove and then another before sliding them back on.

"You told me you'd taken the cure." There shouldn't be accusation in his voice but there is.

"I told you, I did what I wanted." Rogue shrugs her coat on, her hair sliding forward to hide her eyes. "And now I see what you really wanted." she adds softly. When she straightens, they are looking at each other, eye to eye for the first time in what feels like forever: Rogue weary but unsurprised, Bobby shocked and guilty and angry.

"That's not fair."

"Don't-" she answers in a flat cold voice unlike anything he's ever heard from her, "talk to me about fair."

"Rogue-"

She moves past him, towards the door.

"Where are you going?" He demands to her back, his voice rising.

Rogue pauses in the doorway for just a moment but doesn't turn, "I need to find someone." She says before disappearing.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chap. 5-**

"Run to the water and find me there, Burned to the core but not broken" -The streets below the moon -Live

In his dreams, he's touching her. Sliding his hands over her skin, putting his lips on her neck, breathing into her ear. There's a little pain but it's the good kind, like pulling a sliver from a wound. And this time she's touching him back. Her fingers are in his hair, moving over the bones of his shoulders, slipping across his back. Every caress draws something out of him, memories as tangled as the dark woods from fairy tales and just as full of monsters. She weaves them into fire that burns to ash and then to nothing at all until there's nothing left to fear. Until there are no secrets left between them and no space between their bodies- just fire.

When he opens his eyes she's still there.

Sitting crossed legged on the floor, with her back to the wall, watching him silently. His face is pressed into the thin mattress so he sees her with only one eye. That and the early dove gray light of dawn makes her seem two dimensional and thin, like a reflection in shallow water. He gazes at her with one dark thoughtful eye.

Old instincts have him on his feet an instant later. He can't sleep with the wrist flints on- too dangerous, so he has learned to sleep clutching his lighter in one tight fist, holding it closer than any blanket. He slaps it open with sharp motion that is still second nature.

Rogues' eyes move down from his face along his arm to pause on the fire ball, writhing and turning in his fist. "I don't think you'll need that." She observes. In the flickering light of the fire, she can see the pale skin of his inner forearm, the muscles stretched tight as violin strings.

He looks down, sees the gloved hands resting in her lap, "Still you, huh?" He asks, not sounding surprised and then he moves on abruptly, "So where's the rest of team martyr?" He mocks, still holding the flames, refusing to relax. _Where's Bobby?_ He wonders. His head still aches a little sometimes, though the bruise Bobby left over his eyebrow has melted away.

"I came alone, if that's what you're asking."

Rogue notices, wishing she hadn't, that he still sleeps in worn out sweat pants almost identical to what he wore at the mansion. No shirt now, though- there is a long wavering red line where a fold in his sheet had pressed itself onto his chest. She makes a fist from the hand resting on her knee, feeling the thin material of her glove stretch over her knuckles and pull at her finger tips. It helps her resist the urge to yank off the gloves that are her armor and trace the path of the line across his chest with her fingertips.

Pyro closes his fist over the fire, extinguishing it in a gesture of contempt that is almost worse than the cold threatening way he had held it before. The absence of the warm light makes Rogue blink like someone waking from a dream.

"So, did you stop by to tell me all is forgiven and I can come back home?" He asks disdainfully.

That startles a little sound out of her, something like laughter at his audacity, "No."

No. He certainly hadn't been forgiven.

He gazes at her for a long moment as though he doesn't really believe her and then ducks his head abruptly. "Good."

Balancing his weight on one foot, John leans over and picks a dark blue t-shirt off the floor by his cot. Shrugging it on, he moves past her, out the door, and down the short hallway to the kitchen.

With a small sigh, Rogue pushes herself off the floor and follows.

Rogue sits down at the rough kitchen table and watches John toss wood into the ancient stove and then light it with an impatient gesture. He fills a small coffee pot at the hand pump sink. While John has his back to her, Rogue takes the opportunity to study the interior of the cabin a little closer. It's tiny. Two miniscule bedrooms, one little bitty bathroom, and a kitchen open to a small space that serves as the living room. There is no electricity and no toilet but the shack outside, on the edge of the clearing. Rogue had taken a bus into the foothills of the Sierra Madres, and then hitched, and then hiked for nearly a full day to find the cabin; the compass in her blood pointing her, one step after another towards him. The journey was strangely reminiscent of her flight from Mississippi to Alaska. Walking along side the road, she kept expecting Logan to come roaring up on Scotts' motorcycle to offer her a lift.

The cabin reminds her of a shanty her father had out in the swamp that he used as a base for hunting and fishing trips. It had the same wooden floor worn smooth by years of boots and bare feet, the boards warping and popping up in places and the same sort of worn-in dirt that no amount of scrubbing could really touch. Though her father's cabin had been much cozier, the floors covered with bright rag rugs and an ancient stuffed moose head on the wall. She had always wondered about that- where do you get a moose head in Mississippi? She remembered the few times he had taken her there when she was small, teaching her how to bait a hook and how to wait patient and silent and ready for that little tug on the line. Those trips had been long ago, in better days.

This cabin had none of that remembered charm, being little more than a wooden box. The furniture was wooden as well, sturdy and serviceable and not much else. In the living room, there was one ancient rocking chair and a wood frame couch squeezed in front of the small fire place. A worn quilt slung over the back of the couch was the only conceit to hominess or color in the whole place. She assumed the cabin was some kind of Brotherhood safe house. She couldn't imagine Pyro so far out in the woods for any other reason than his desperate need to elude the authorities.

Not that the cabins' isolation had prevented her from finding him.

Setting the pot onto the burner finally, John turns and asks, "Are you still here?"

Maybe she deserves that- she doesn't know sometimes, anymore what right and wrong are. And she had left him in that alley. The guilt makes her want to turn it into a joke, "I missed you too." She says, giving him the teasing one corner smile that had charmed so many other boys.

"But you had Bobby to keep you warm." He snaps back. Then he looks down at her gloved hands deliberately, "Oh, wait- no, you didn't."

There is a small painful squeak from Rogues' chair as she recoils just a little from his words and the bitter acid tone of his voice. But she doesn't run. She laces her trembling fingers on the table in front of her and raises her chin. If that's what he needs to feel better than she can endure it. She's determined to get what she came for.

She knew it wouldn't be easy.

But he's just getting started, "Is that why you didn't take it?" John refers to the cure, as he leans taut against the sink and stares down at her, unblinkingly, "Because you decided you didn't really want to spend the rest of your life curled up next to a human ice cube?"

And, as practiced as Rogue is at enduring, even she will only take so much. Rogue crosses her arms against her chest, unconsciously mimicking his insolent posture. She doesn't know it but she looks eerily like Logan. She has the same affronted expression he gets just before he slaps somebody down for intruding on his inner territory.

"He tol' me what happened at Alcatraz," She says, her drawl surfacing a little with the anger, "-must be embarrassing for you- gettin' your ass kicked by someone like Bobby."

A muscle in his jaw twitches, "He got lucky- it won't happen twice."

"He was your friend once." She says, surprised by how sharp her voice is.

John gives her an incredulous look, as though he is trying to decide if she can actually believe anything so naïve. "No. He wasn't."

There is a dead moment of silence as they stare at each other. For people like them, were memories ever simple?

"What are you doing here, Rogue?" John asks finally, smoothing his hair back with a rough hand.

She takes a deep breath, straightening her shoulders, "I want to learn." She tries ineffectually to swallow, ". . . teach me."


	6. Chapter 6

A/N: Short chapter, I know. Sorry, folks- don't worry. I still love you. Hot stuff in the works.

**Chap. 6-**

"Don't try to find the answer,

When there ain't no questions here" -The streets below the moon -Live

The blank look on Johns' face is probably as close to surprise or bewilderment as he is capable of getting now. Looking at that expression, Rogue has the hysterical urge to laugh.

His shock doesn't last long, though. "You want me to teach you." He repeats flatly.

"Yes."

He waits.

For someone who has always claimed he hates uncomfortable silence, John's gotten pretty good at using it. He wields the quiet like some kind of ancient torture device, pressing on her mercilessly as thought it could squeeze the words out of her mouth. Rogue tries to resist- she's getting a little tired of how everything always has to be on his terms. But he's staring at her too, like he can look straight into her skull and he's just waiting for her to confess to everything he can see in there . . . and that she can't handle- not today.

"I didn't take the cure-" The words drag out of her mouth, "I couldn't. But . . . I can't live like this, either. I have to be able to control it." Rogue bites her bottom lip, "You said it would take practice . . ."

"Why don't you ask Bobby to help you out with your little experiment?" He sneers. Before she can reply, he answers for her, his upper lip curling, "I get it. You don't want to risk hurting him." He steps forward, putting his palms flat on the table and leaning down just inches from her face, "_But you can suck me dry and sleep just fine at night, right_?"

She flinches. And he steps back slowly, satisfied as he watches the guilt wash over her.

She could tell him- there is no Bobby. Not for her. Not anymore.

But instead she disregards the shaking in her limbs and the tears trying to form in her eyes and spits out at him, "_What_? Are you scared?"

"Don't try that reverse psychology _shit_ on me- " The coffee pot is boiling furiously, shaking on the stovetop but John ignores it, "Give me one reason why I should help you."

Underneath the table, Rogue grips her knee tightly; afraid she is shaking so hard the chair will start to rattle soon. She looks around at the cabin deliberately, "I know where you are."

The fire in the stove roars suddenly, blowing the lid off the coffee pot and actually throwing one of the burner covers off so the flames flare through the hole. "_Don't _threaten me, either." Reaching over, John yanks the pot off the stove to slam it down on the counter beside the sink, stopping the coffee as it boils over. Turning back to her, he demands again, "One. Reason."

You touched me before, she thinks. You slid your fingers into my hair and told me I wasn't broken.

Rogue gets to her feet slowly. Rounding the table towards him, the ground feels soft and swaying beneath her. She comes to stand so close he lowers the arms crossed against his chest.

Looking up into John's face, Rogue can see his pupils spread wide, black hiding the ambiguous color of his eyes. "You get to touch me." She whispers.

He draws a sudden sharp breath.

"That's what you do, right?" she asks in the small trembling space between their mouths, "You touch the fire, hold things no one else can?"

There is an infinite moment stretching between them. Anything could happen. Anything. Rogue waits for him to scream, to shove her away, to set her on fire and watch while she burns. She waits for him to kiss her, to yank her into his arms or lay her back across the table, to rip her gloves off and fill all the empty spaces between them.

The seconds pull taut and thin, hearts beating wild and ragged into the crowded stillness.

Shoving past her, she hears him say, "Fine."

Then he is gone.

When the door slams shut behind him, Rogue collapses, bracing herself against the edge of the sink which still seems warm even through her gloves, as though it holds a trace of his presence. She draws a shuddering panicky breath like a sob. Leaning over, she rests her head on the back of her hands, still gripping the edge of the sink and feels a few tears leak through her gloves onto her skin.

In and out. In. And. Out. She concentrates on just breathing.

After a few moments, the girl lifts her head, pushing her long hair out of her face. It's over, Rogue reassures herself. It's over.

Over for now, maybe. But just beginning in reality.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chap. 7- **

It's all more than she can think about at the moment. She should sleep. The road to this place has been long, exhaustingly long. Rogue feels something strange, like taking one sharp step to the right of her body as she thinks maybe she has been walking the road to this place her whole life.

Then she rubs at her eyes with the heels of her hands, like she could rub that absurd thought right out of her head.

God, she's tired. The couch is calling to her. Johns' bed is even more appealing but she's used up her quota of brave in confronting him once today and she immediately rejects that thought.

Stumbling over to the couch, she falls asleep with her gloves on.

She wakes with a start a few hours later in the early afternoon light and experiences the instantaneous moment of confusion everyone feels waking up in a strange place. Staring up at the ceiling, she orients herself again- the mountains, the cabin, John- still not back. Her mind starts to drift toward their deal- and then she decides it's time to get up. A few hours sleep has taken the edge off but she's still not ready to think about . . . any of that.

Rogue glances around the cabin a little frantically, looking for something to occupy her. And her eyes fall onto her big army surplus duffel.

It's something to do anyway.

She does laundry. Hers and Johns.

Rogue pulls the gigantic tin tub off a nail in the wall and digs through the cupboards for the largest three pots she can find. She fills them with water and sets them onto the stove to heat. Walking over to the door, she lifts the duffel with a grunt and fumbles it over to the table to thump it down. She sorts the dirty clothes from it into piles on the floor, more out of habit then anything else. It'll all get washed in the same tub, anyway.

Then she takes a deep breath. And walks down the hall.

John has learned some discipline since the mansion- his clothes are still on the floor but this time they're all in one pile in a corner of the room. Rogue picks them up gingerly, holding his boxers between two fingers away from her body while she pretends she's not holding them. The rest of his clothes- mostly jeans and t-shirts, she tucks in one arm against her body. One of his t-shirts brushes the underside of her chin. This close, she can smell John in them, warm and sharp. Her eyes fall closed for a second as she walks back down the hall as she takes in the scent- tasting it in her mouth.

She almost runs into the table.

That wakes her up a bit. She sorts Johns' laundry into her piles just as the water on the stove starts to steam. It occurs to her she doesn't have any soap which sends her scrambling through the cupboards again until she locates a box of powdered soap under the sink. Despite the bareness of the rest of the cabin, the cupboards are fully stocked- cleaning and camping supplies and food, even linens. Life in the Brotherhood wasn't as uncomfortable as she would have thought- or maybe it wasn't that uncomfortable when you were in close proximity to Magneto. For a second she wonders if using this cabin- if using this _soap_ makes her some kind of collaborator.

It could almost be a funny except that the only alternative at this point is to walk out the door and that she won't do.

There are several lengths of rope in the cupboard and even a bucket of clothes pins.

Rogue sticks her head out the door reluctantly. She can feel John some distance away, her sense of him an annoying grain of sand stuck under her collarbone. Even though she knows he is no where near the cabin she is still irrationally afraid that he might be lurking in the clearing somehow. And she's not ready to face him again so soon. Her face drifts a little toward the southwest. She can feel him moving away from the cabin, away from her.

Rogue wonders briefly if he's running but disregards the thought immediately. John wouldn't run from God himself- he wouldn't give God the satisfaction.

Then she wonders, if he was running, would she chase him.

Rogue sees the heavy wooden posts for the clothesline in the yard. She must have been half-blind with anxiety and exhaustion to have missed them this morning. She crosses the yard quickly, trying to ignore the weakness in her legs. Stretching onto her toes she can just reach the cross beams comfortably. She ties the rope up and silently thanks Logan for his impromptu lessons on survival skills like knot tying.

Then she has to stop for a second and lean her face against the rough surface of the post and rest. The breeze stirs her hair. It's a good day for laundry- a warm sunny day in early autumn, wind teasing gently between the trees. Their leaves are just beginning to color.

Rogue breathes in and out again deliberately but it doesn't stop the stab of panic that hits her. What has she done? What is she _doing_?

Laundry, she tells herself. Right now I'm doing laundry.

Back inside, she does the laundry in a state of weary calm, the result of encroaching exhaustion. One of Johns' red t-shirts swirls in the tub and a pale pair of her underwear surfaces and then submerges, a ghostly fish swimming in a sea of color. The sight of her and Johns' clothes churning together in the tub is oddly pleasing.

Rogue rinses the laundry in the sink, rings it out roughly and lugs it outside in an empty pot to hang on the line.

She's more than a little shaky at this point from wrestling the pots and wet clothes but doing the wash has only brought home how dirty she is. She considers lying down but the tension is still holding on tight. And it's been a while since she last showered. No wonder John wasn't rushing to touch her she thought wry and a little bitter, catching a trace of her own smell.

Rogue knows there's no way she can sleep comfortably now that she's noticed how dirty she is. She'll have to have a bath. She's half soaked anyway.

Putting on more water to heat, Rogue munches listlessly on some crackers from the cupboard. They are . . . not good but at this point even chewing is quickly depleting what little energy she has left. When the water starts to simmer Rogue takes careful note of Johns' position. That particular aspect of her power gives her a better idea of direction than distance but she can tell that he's far enough away that she can have her bath uninterrupted. Rogue glances out the window, noticing the shadows getting longer. It will be dark soon.

She empties the water from the stove top into the tub, almost scalding herself in the process. It's stupid to worry about him, Rogue reminds herself roughly. There's nothing in the woods he couldn't take easily- bears, cougars- Sasquatch, maybe. Not that she's worried anyway.

Rogue moves to take off her shirt and remembers all her other clothes are drying on the line outside. Glancing out the window uncertainly, she hesitates and then looks down at the waiting, steaming water.

She _will_ have her bath.

Moving stiffly, she marches into Johns' room and pulls out a pair of boxers and one of the two clean and remaining t-shirts. If he has a problem with that maybe next time he shouldn't disappear for a whole day forcing her to fend for herself.

Back in the kitchen, she undresses quickly and self-consciously, hating being naked in a place where she can't even lock the door. And even in her strange life, she's never taken a tin tub bath in someones' kitchen. It is exactly as awkward and uncomfortable as she would have imagined. Ineffective, too. She has to put her head under the tap and pump the sink with one hand to rinse her hair. Her left ear ends up full of water.

The cabin is filling up with darkness by the time she towels off roughly and slips into Johns' clothes. The boxers are flannel, soft and worn, and just putting them on- feeling them against her bare skin makes her heart pound. I just got into Johns' boxers, Rogue thinks and a hysterical laugh escapes her into the silence of the cabin. Pressing her hand against her mouth she cuts off the alarming sound. Then she covers her weary and watery eyes with one damp palm before letting her hand fall.

She glances down at her dirty clothes folded on the table. Her gloves are sitting on the top of the pile, stiff with sweat and dirt. The thought of putting them on her clean skin is repulsive but she always wears them. Her bare fingers grip the edge of the t-shirt she's wearing absently. She always used to do a lot of things.

Screw it, she decides.

Screw all of it- Screw the gloves. Screw the tub that she should empty before she lies down. Screw the wet towel hanging on the chair and the clothes that should come in off the line. Screw the uncomfortable and creaky couch.

Screw John, who's left her alone in the gathering dark.

Rogue falls asleep in his bed, enveloped by clothes and sheets and blankets that smell like him.

Sometime in the night, she dreams that John walks into the room and crouches down by the cot, so close that they are breathing each other's breath when she opens her eyes. She knows she's asleep because he looks weary and full of longing and he reaches out to brush a lock of hair out of her eyes. The pad of his longest finger skims her temple and nothing happens. She looks just as sad back at him until her eyes slide closed again and the dream fades, changing to an old fantasy full of repressed images of Mississippi.

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A/N: I know this chap. was not exactly action packed but every time I tried to write it a different way I kept coming back to this so I guess it was what had to be. And let me take this opportunity to re-iterate the awesomeness of my readers.

You guys are awesome.

(That was not intended to be self-serving at all, I promise.)


	8. Chapter 8

A/N: This is dedicated to all my lovely readers who keep me going. You know who you are. Primarily because you're reading this right now.

**Chap. 8-**

John is back in the kitchen the next morning when Rogue finally manages to shake free of her dreams. The light coming through the windows tells her it's still morning- though not _early_ and she pushes out of John's bed to wander toward the sounds coming from the other end of the cabin.

She doesn't know if she feels relieved or apprehensive to see him again.

John is dressed, standing at the sink with his back to her as he washes dishes. He's wearing dark green cargo pants and a t-shirt of indeterminate color. It might have been blue or green or black at one point but now it's just . . . murky. The color seems appropriate- murky like John, murky like her feelings, murky like- _like her_.

The pants and shirt are both things she washed yesterday. He must have pulled them off the line. There's something vaguely militant about all of John's clothes now, Rogue notes. Like he's watched the Terminator movies too many times and he thinks he needs to prepare for complete societal breakdown. That thought and the sight of his smooth shoulder blades under his murky colored t-shirt annoys Rogue.

She's also annoyed that he has beaten her to the kitchen. He has the advantage, standing at the sink already dressed, looking coolly collected and in control. Not like Rogue who is fuzzy brained and incomprehensible even to herself.

She hesitates at the end of the hall for a second unsure what her best play is – should she step outside and take the rest of the clothes off the line? He has already emptied the water she used for her bath last night and hung up the tub. Should she apologize for leaving it there on the floor? Should she say good morning? Should she sit down at the table and pick a fight on her terms?

John takes one step to the right to set the plate he has just washed down and Rogue notices his bare feet for the first time. And wishes she hadn't, because the sight of the pale underside of his foot –brushed with dirt on the pad and heel- awakens something tender in her, a feeling like a bruise just healing. It is the kind of feeling you hold yourself stiff around, always aware that if you brush it against something it will blossom instantly into pain.

The feeling makes her cross the kitchen carefully and pull a towel out of a drawer to dry the wet dishes he has stacked beside the sink. He hands her a pan like they do dishes together every morning and then glances down at her. His eyes fall from her face to the gloves she put on before leaving his room and then down to her makeshift pajamas. And Rogue suddenly remembers that she is wearing his boxers. She knows he sees them- his expression goes strange for a second but he pulls whatever he is feeling back from his eyes, tucking it away from her. Glancing back into her face, he notes, "You look like hell."

His observation stings, though she knows it's probably true. Rogue is always pale as the underside of a fish in the morning and last night she had gone to sleep with her hair wet. It is probably standing up in the back, having dried as she slept on it, making her skull look weird and lumpy.

He would never politely pretend he didn't see it. And in a way she supposes she should be flattered. Like Logan he's never treated her as though he thought she needed to be coddled, never treated her like she was fragile and therefore weak the way Bobby did.

But it stings anyway.

"Well, you look-" Rogue starts to snap back but can't finish, staring up into his face.

It's the first time she's really studied John; at least it's the first time she's studied him while he was awake, since he left the school.

He looks . . . dangerous. Lean and ruthless and powerful.

So many people had mistaken Johns' flat disdain for bravado, believing that someone so young could not possibly be so indomitable. But Rogue has always known the truth- John never does _anything_ unless he decides to do it. And there is nothing John _won't_ do, if he decides to do it.

All of that shows clearly now- his fearlessness and will.

You look hot, Rogue thinks. And some quiet ironic part of her adds- no pun intended.

She's not going to tell him that though.

She's tempted to tell him he looks like an asshole.

"How do I look?" He prompts almost mocking, his hands stilling on the dish he holds. He turns towards her, one hip leaning against the sink.

Rogue looks down and away, stepping around him to put the pan in her hands back where it belongs. With her back to him and her head almost in the cupboard as she leans over, she answers cryptically, "You look like yourself."

When she straightens, he's staring at her. "Sit down." He says flatly, nodding at the table.

She knows what he intends and she feels the panic rocket up inside of her, "Now?" she asks. The fear is squeezing her voice, making it come out thin and sharp.

"That's why you came here, right?" John demands. There is about a yard of space between them and for once he doesn't close on her. He leaves the space there between them like it is something solid he can't pass through, "So you can fix what's _wrong_ with you and go running back to Bobby?"

She let him think this was about Bobby and now it's Bobby invisibly filling the space between them.

"Are we going to do this or what?" He asks when she hesitates again.

Rogues' fear and her desperate desire for control had pressed her to live in a box until its' walls had become the only thing she could feel against her skin. She does not want to spend the rest of her life in that box. This is the first step out of it.

Rogue nods, her heart pounding in her throat so she can barely breathe.

John moves toward the chair on the opposite side of the table and Rogue sits down across from him apprehensively.

"Take them off." He says.

With a shaking hand she fumbles one glove off. When she reaches for the other, John makes an impatient sound and takes her wrist, pulling the glove off her trembling arm. It peels free with a sensation like a snap but without the snapping _sound_.

With his fingertips, he pushes her wrists down until the backs of her hands rest on the tabletop. Her palms sit upturned between them, naked and vulnerable. Rogue takes a deep unsteady breath and tries not to notice how in this position the trembling in her hands makes her fingers twitch like spider legs.

John lays his own hands over hers and Rogues' fingers automatically curl towards the warmth.

"Don't." John instructs quietly. His voice is not afraid or panicked but the word slaps at Rogue anyway and she moves to pull her hands away but he grips her fingers before she's out of reach.

It begins.

Each time is different but the same for Rogue- like they say sex is, she supposes- not that Rogue would know from personal experience.

This time John is like burning oil, sliding through her veins in waves. His presence is intrusive, ubiquitous. Every lap pushes him to run deeper into her like a rising tide- remembering how it was the last time, Rogue tries to relax. But trying not to fight is a kind of fight in and of itself. She keeps her eyes closed, avoiding the inevitable sight of blue lashing his face.

"Breathe." Says a low voice and Rogue takes a desperate aching breath. It's like swallowing water instead of air as John floods into her. She is loosing her will to fight the tide. She wonders if junkies feel something similar. Could chemicals possibly produce anything like this hot sweet venom under her skin?

When the fire reaches her brain it causes sudden images to bloom on the inside of her eyelids. She makes a little noise, something like a whimper because the pictures come so fast and they are attended by other abrupt and overwhelming sensations. It all rushes by in a dizzy procession that she can't make sense of. Flashes of faces she doesn't recognize and emotions she knows all too well- a pain in her cheek like a slap, the taste of blood in her mouth, laughter in her ears, a warm alluring smell and a hot feeling low in her belly. Too much.

Too _much_.

Rogue clutches desperately at one passing memory and gasps as her ears fill with screams and shouts and she feels as though she is trapped and surrounded, hemmed in on all sides. A sensation of hate rolls over her and she loosens the memory, lets it fall away into the stream.

The bitter taste of hate lingers in her mouth and she throws herself into another image to try and wash it away. The new memory takes hold and her breath eases in her chest. She feels almost peaceful, nearly relaxed. There is a candle sitting on a desk by a bed . . .

"What do you see?" John demands, his voice low and gravelly.

"You used to keep a candle by your bed." She answers, softly. "You would fall asleep watching it. The fire-" She never imagined. No wonder he loves it. "The fire-" she tries to explain.

"It has a voice," he finishes for her. Rogue can feel his fingers, biting into the soft skin of her hands and wrists.

John would fall asleep listening to the flame, letting it sing him into oblivion the way his mother did when he was very young. Before she left. Sometimes when the fire touches his face he still imagines it is her warm hand.

Rogue holds the little vulnerable truth inside herself. She doesn't want to let it go and see it shatter against his hard, wounded eyes. So she keeps it hidden inside like a seashell in a jewelry box, delicate prickly edges sitting brittle against velvet, something to be protected.

By holding to that calm luminous center, she can let the rest of it flow over her. Just a rock, she reminds herself, a stone on the beach.

"You were six when your grandmother died. You had to wear a black dress." Rogue opens her eyes slowly. His head is bowed and she can't see his face, only his hands gripping hers. "It itched." There's a pounding behind her eyes as she listens to him describe that day. She was too young at the time to understand what was happening or what it meant but she remembered that they made her wear shoes and that horrible dress and sit all day in the stuffy dimness of the funeral home.

"People kept patting you on the head. You hated it- all those people-"

She did hate it. Hated the soft weeping and the crowd. Hated sitting on the hard chair with her feet dangling and all those damn people she didn't know touching her.

She had felt trapped.

She feels something similar again. "It was a bad day," she manages to say, letting half formed images and memories wash over her. The waves are getting bigger; the burning in her veins is growing hotter.

"You hated wearing shoes," he observes and even with his head down she sees his lips curve a little. His voice is thin, "You still do."

Another wave of fire hits her and she tries to stand firm but swaying against it. There are more pictures in it, crashing against her, turning and swirling, trying to drag her down.

He has a reoccurring dream. The world is on fire. He walks through it alone like God.

"John. Let go."

"What do you see?" He asks, still not raising his head. Rogue tries to pull free but he was smart. With her palms turning up, she is in the weaker position and he holds her easily. She knows that John wakes from the dream drenched in sweat, with his heart pounding but he's never afraid. He described the dream once to Magneto-

John sucks in a sudden breath, interrupting the image in her head, "Bobby gave you his mother's clothes to wear that morning in Boston-"

No.

Too close. There are things he shouldn't know.

She pulls hard again and the bones in her hands and her wrists grind under the force of their struggle.

John glances up for just a second and Rogue flinches away from the bruise blue lines slicing across his face. "He told you he wasn't afraid." Johns' dark eyes are hard as a slap.

"Let go." She begs one more time.

"He grabbed you and you felt-"

She stops trying to resist- she lets it all come, arms thrown wide open, head tilted back like Jean just before the water took her. Johns' words are choked off and she drinks him down hard and fast like shots lined up on a bar. She's inundated with him. Her muscles and bones and brain grow heavy under the weight.

Vaguely, she feels John tugging at her hands, trying to get away from her.

I'm the strong one now, she thinks.

With one last desperate effort, he pulls his hands away, throwing himself backwards out of the chair so that it screams across the floor, wavers, and falls. When Rogue opens her eyes, he's standing at the kitchen sink again with his back to her. His hands are spread wide, palms pressing into the cool edge of the counter, head hanging low.

She can hear his ragged breath and see it shaking him, as well.

After a minute he says, "You can have the other bedroom. There are sheets in the hall closet."

Pushing off the sink, he walks down the hall into his room without showing her his face. The door shuts behind him.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:** I'm sorry you've been waiting so long. I hit a snag but I'm working on it. Of course, if Ebon Hush updates her fic "Tabula Rasa" I might be inspired to update this one a little more regularly. Hmmm. . .

**Chapter 9, Part I-**

"Turn around." She told Bobby quietly.

He turned like she asked, showing her his back before she turned as well, to slide out of her nightgown. She almost felt it when he glanced back over his shoulder to watch her but she didn't look back to check or reproach him. She could feel his eyes on her, heavy and sly. He wanted her. Her body. Her touch. He thought he knew what it meant, what it would be like. He thought he understood.

He understood nothing.

Rogue had never been so aware of her own power. Five whole feet between them and she could almost taste him. It would be so easy. She could just turn. Meet his eyes and watch him acquiesce. Animals did that sometimes, she had read. Sometimes, the predator was so close in the chase the prey would just give themselves up to the inevitable, throwing away pain and fear- almost grateful to fall under fang and claw.

She imagined Bobby opening his arms to her, never realizing until too late what she was. He would be cool, she thought, trembling. He would be sweet and melting on her tongue like the popsicles they ate in Mississippi in the burning summer.

He would offer no resistance.

Rogue fumbled a little as she stepped into the jeans he had given her. He wouldn't resist, she thought. He would beg for it. If she was a goddess, he would run to the alter. Even the teeming silence between their turned backs was an offering.

He was calling to her and Rogue spun slowly to meet his longing. But he wasn't looking at her. She took one step towards him and then another. Look at me, Bobby, she thought. Show me your eyes. Somehow, she was standing right behind him. _Ask me_.

She went so far as to reach out and touch him on the shoulder. He moved around slowly like he was frightened of startling her. Bobby looked at her out of foolish hungry eyes.

She could have him- everything- his power, his strength, his innocence. Imagine the experience of being him. She was standing in his house, she could see the money and comfort evident in his upper-middle class childhood. Even before she became a freak, she had never known that level of _security_.

She could take it; carry it around inside herself always. There were inches between them and he kept moving closer like a mouse charmed by a snake.

Eat him. Something inside said. Eat him _alive_.

"Rogue." He groaned just before their lips met-

The girl sat up in bed, scrambling across the covers, like she could put physical distance between herself and the dream.

No.

She put her face into her naked hands, scrubbing at the skin until it hurt, knowing that she deserved the pain. She pulled her knees up, wrapping her arms tight around them.

That's not how it happened, she reminded herself desperately. I stopped. I didn't hurt him.

Much.

Putting her face on her knees, Rogue didn't notice that her cheeks were wet. Her tears left a dark rough-edged pool behind to stain the sheets tented over her kneecaps.

Bobby. She had wanted to suck him dry: drink his tears, sip his blood, and crack his bones open for the marrow. That could have been the time she couldn't stop.

There was a small desperate sound prowling the room like the creak of the floor boards. It came from Rogue as she tried to strangle her own sobs.

She hadn't wanted Bobby. Not really. Not the way he thought she had. She wanted what he had- to feel normal. To be not a broken freak. She thought if she stayed close to him the light of it might reflect off her.

Some wounded childish part of her was still screaming, "Want, want, want, want, _want!_"

John was twelve steps down the hall. She could feel him turn in his sleep.

Want.

John was like Bobby in more ways then he would admit to. Like Bobby he was utterly in control of his power. Like Bobby, he felt no shame or fear of what he was. . .

_No_.

She came here to get control of her power, not to let it loose to devour-

Rogue pulled the sheet off the bed and stepped toward the window. There was a thin crescent moon hanging in the sky, a curved line between the dark and the light.

She shivered.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10 -**

There's a fire in the fireplace. The nights are getting cooler- not quite cold yet as the summer drains away from the mountains but John has never really needed an excuse to start a fire.

Lying on the couch, he is toying absently with a bite of flame from the fireplace, turning it around in his hand, shifting it from finger to finger like a street magician with a coin. With the fingertips of his other hand he holds down the page of a ragged copy of 'Heart of Darkness'.

John has become a reader.

Or he has become secure enough or indifferent enough to her opinion to _admit_ that he likes to read. It's hard to tell which. He looks surprisingly natural in the firelight, frowning gently down at the book with the flame like a content and playful pet in his hand. He's draped all over the ancient couch, one leg over the arm, the other foot resting flat on the floor. The book is propped on his stomach, leaning against a pillow resting against his legs. The rugged coffee table exists between him and Rogue where she sits in the hard rocking chair staring into the fire.

John won't touch her.

In the confines of the cabin, he steps around her carefully, keeping the thinnest of spaces between them. Just enough air to prevent actual contact. Rogue should be used to such treatment. People have been just a little afraid of her for so long.

But it's not fear. Not with him.

It's a choice.

Once a day, he sits down across from her and waits silently until she turns her naked palms towards him. Then he touches her, refusing to show any emotion or desire, showing nothing until whatever it is that happens between them begins to happen. Then memories erupt from him like water through holes in a dam. And when one of them can't take it anymore and they break contact, it's over. They go silently back to whatever they were doing and neither of them speaks about what they had seen between them.

John never seems the least embarrassed.

For Rogue there is no predicting when their little lessons will happen- afternoon, morning, high noon. He even woke her up once in the middle of the night to sit in the moonlight flooded kitchen- their memories that evening were particularly strange and intimate.

She feels like a ghost, haunting his house until he deigns to notice her.

Now he's turning his index finger in idle circles and the fire swirls around it, responding to some centrifugal force. His hand has drifted down, close to the old couch cushions. They are beginning to smoke.

"John," Rogue says flatly, "You're going to set the couch on fire."

He doesn't even look up; he just moves his hand out and away from the couch.

Rogue has the sudden urge to scream.

Since she came here, everything has been on his terms. Everything.

She drums her fingers on the arm of the rocking chair. She stands abruptly, impatiently and moves to leave the room. Pausing by the couch just above his head, Rogue mutters something at John that might be 'goodnight'. Then she waits. After what seems like a ridiculously long pause, John raises his free arm and wiggles his fingers absently, never looking up from his book.

The urge to rip her gloves off and press her fingers to his upside down face is so strong, Rogue is held immobile by it. She stands perfectly still, refusing to give in and terrified that any motion she makes will lead to just that event.

Don't look at me, John, she thinks frantically.

_Look at me, John._ Something else whispers in her head.

Rogue stands by the couch for hours, centuries- a pale stiff figure made of wax. Below her John turns a page idly, his index finger caressing the papers edge. In her dream, that first night, John had touched her face with that same gesture. She moves infinitesimally towards him.

He rubs the bottom of his foot absently against the arm of the couch like it itches. An innocent unconscious gesture- a human gesture.

Rogue walks away.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

She's dreaming again. The scenes behind her eyes are sliding by so fast she hardly registers one before another takes its' place.

_Logans' agonized face, his blades buried deep in her stomach while she reaches out with a shaking hand to save her own life. There is moisture on his cheek that is probably sweat but might be tears._

_The professor, in his study, explaining to her class where they fit into the theory of evolution. Then the professor trying to explain to the betrayed little girl inside her that her parents weren't _bad_ people, just ill-equipped to handle the circumstance that fate had dealt them. _

_A man with deep eyes and heavy features praying over a loaf of bread, at a table lit with candles. _

_Her father, smiling at her across a picnic table on some half-forgotten day. She must have been very small then- he seemed so tall and she knew without a doubt that he loved her._

_Someone who is less than a face and more a series of familiar impressions - rough hands and rough words. Sneering eyes-_

_Magneto like she had never seen him, laughing with his mouth open, head thrown back, neither mocking nor cruel._

There's something she wants to tell them- all of them. Something important that she had known just a moment ago but keeps slipping from her mind each time one of them slips away.

They say her name. Rogue.

Their faces are perplexed.

Rogue.

She needs them to be quiet, to hold still for just a second so she can remember.

Rogue.

Magneto says her name but he uses the professors' voice. There is a question in it. A hint of disapproval.

Rogue.

Bobby has walked in from off-stage, reaching toward her until the hand between them is full of claws and she looks up into Logans' face.

Rogue.

The man at the table says her name in a language she doesn't know but she recognizes it anyway.

Rogue.

She can't remember anymore that she wanted to tell them anything, she just wants them to stop looking at her, to stop intruding-

Rogue.

I can't –

Marie.

She sits up in bed, breath desperate and aching in her chest. Her cold naked fingers close around the sheets under her hands and John is there. He sits on the edge of the mattress and watches her silently in that way she recognizes. Rogue lets go of the blankets and her head falls into her hands.

"Not tonight John, _please_." She whispers. She's just not strong enough to fight it tonight.

His calm face gives way to anger, "Yes, tonight! Every damn night- are you in control or not? _How weak are you?"_ He demands.

Crying out, Rogue throws herself at him. He falls back against the bed under her weight, her bare fingertips pressed to either side of her face just as she had imagined earlier.


	11. Chapter 11

"under your skin feels like home

electric shocks on aching bones" -Snow Patrol

**Chapter 10 -**

She's so close; her eyes, not even inches away from his, are shut tight against him, so that all he sees are the fine lashes trembling against her cheek. Her fingertips dig into the skin of his face. Her power is ripping at him, clawing and yanking at his guts, as angry as she is.

Memories and pain pile up between them.

_Magnetos' voice floats to him through a haze of fire. It is thin and far away, like he is trying to talk to Pyro across centuries or continents instead of the flames. His words are almost incomprehensible as he shouts. The fire is all around John, paler and hotter than he could ever remember it being, pushing him to the limits of his power. _

"_-wanted you to be afraid. He wanted you to be afraid of the fire, to be afraid of what you are-" Magnetos' voice drifts into him. Who wanted that? Pyro thinks dreamily, stretching out one hand to watch the flames lick at his fingertips. The fire is screaming in Pyros' ears, hungry as it has never been before. Want, want, want, want. It begs and pleads and demands to be let loose. _

"_Are you afraid, Pyro?" Magnetos' voice is suddenly so clear he could be standing inches away. _

"_No." He answers. _

_The idea is absurd. _

_He has never been afraid of the fire. Never. Not since that first time when he became what he was always meant to be. _

_It's so absurd, it's funny. Pyro tilts his head back and laughs and laughs._

He brushes the cheek so close to his mouth with his lips and sees her flinch. So he nuzzles the underside of her jaw, refusing to give her any space. She jerks again but doesn't pull away, instead she tilts her head back like she can't resist anymore.

Johns' head is swimming- his eyes working for a moment and then darkness over taking him. It's a little like fighting to remain conscious except that every time his vision fails he feels every other sense more acutely. Blackness- and her breathing is like wind in his ears and across his skin. Darkness- and her smell fills him up like he is drinking her down as surely as she is drinking him.

Her eyes are still shut as though she thinks that if she can't see it, it's not really happening. He kisses her collar bone, using his tongue and teeth this time, wanting her to acknowledge him. He thinks, _I'm not Bobby_.

John has never made love to a girl.

Oh, he's had enough of them. There are plenty of girls as raw and destructive as he is, as willing to use another person to scratch that itch. But he has never given of himself.

When Rogue touches him, he feels _seen_. Everything is clear, untangled. Pure. The sullen heat under his breastbone catches and blooms into flame. Something pours out of him that is worth taking.

Even the memories that he never touches, the memories that only seem to show how broken he is, are bearable. They tumble out of him into her open hands and their jagged edges wear away.

_The station was dank, the walls running with sweat, bleeding condensation from the sweltering Baltimore night. It reeked of all the worst smells people were capable of producing- vomit and piss and body odor- magnified by the heat and humidity. Even at two in the morning there was no relief from it. And the fluorescents overhead put off a grainy blue light that made everyone underneath look like a corpse, cop and criminal alike._

_In Johns' memory, he sits in the center of a vast room in that stinking station, crowded with dilapidated desks belonging to the angry cops who circle him. _

_At first, the cops had put him in the open air holding cell filled with the usual two a.m. street dregs- tranny prostitutes and drunks and sullen gang-bangers. It was a move intended to scare him away from his life of crime, no doubt, and also to punish him for some of the comments he had showered on the officers who brought him in. John was only fifteen, short and scrawny for a teenager and entirely powered by rage._

_Ten minutes after being shoved into the cag-, when the screaming started, John and the rest of the prisoners had to be evacuated so the fire could be put out._

_It didn't take long to figure out who had started it. He still had his lighter on him. It was when one of the officers tried to take it away from him that the real trouble started. _

_They had to knock him unconscious to stop the fire. _

Rogues' body is warm and heavy lying over him. Her hands- so angry just seconds before- have moved away from his face. Tangling in his hair at the nape of his neck, the fingers of her right hand spread wide and then tighten again. John twists his arms around her waist, holding her close against him. The hardly-there clothes she wears to bed are no barrier at all- finally they are touching each other. He can feel their skin pressed together in so many places- the inside of her thigh against the outside of his, one of her ankle bones sliding against his calf, bony knees nestled together. The fingertips of his hands are pulling at her spine and the taut canvas of her stomach brushes the line of hair beginning just below his navel. Her forearm bows across his shoulder as though on violin strings as her fingers move in his hair. Rogue runs her left hand over his ribs beneath his shirt. Her lips are moving over his shoulder and up his neck. He turns his face into the kiss-

_When he woke up he was sprawled across a rock-hard chair and shackled to a pipe. His lighter was gone. _

_They put the cuff up high so that his arm dangled uncomfortably, the metal biting into his wrist. That was deliberate, too. _

_He doesn't care about the chair or even much about the cuff. He didn't care about the police men and the terror and fury thinly veiled by their uniforms. Fuck them. But the humidity bothered him. He could feel it crawling on him, clinging like dirt, filthy like someone elses' sweat. Like a cat he had never much cared for water. _

_His hand was pale as paper and his fingertips numb when the Prof. arrived. The atmosphere in the room was stretched taut as sinew. _

_In Johns' memory Prof. Xavier had to cross between miles of deserted desks to reach him and when he arrived, he was as untouched by the filth and degradation around him as a Catholic saint. Cyclops was with him, of course, tall and broad and stoic under the ugly light. _

_The ensuing discussion was vague in Johns' head, probably the result of the blow he had taken, right below his ear. What he did remember was Xavier meeting his eyes for the first time, his gaze gentle. Then he saw the professors' eyes flicker towards his shoulder and the wet spot there. _

"_Why is he bleeding?" The Professor asked quietly. _

Johns' head falls back and a groan escapes him. Rogue moves impatiently, tugging at his shirt wanting to feel more. John rolls them over, pressing down into her like they could melt together.

He feels like he is melting- all his hard edges going soft and bleeding away under the heat-

As they turn to liquid, he can peer back into her.

_Sunlight was pouring into the kitchen, catching on the pale curtains and staining the floor. Rogue sliced peaches silently standing at the cutting block. Her mother was six feet down the counter, rolling out pie dough. It was two feet farther than she usually stood. It was as far as she could stand without pressing herself up against the wall. The radio played quietly in the background but the air was remained strained and tense. _

_David might die. No one was sure yet what would happen- what had happened. _

_And here they were, pretending normal._

_Like Maries' skin hadn't turned to poison. _

"_Almost done, sweetheart?" her mother asked, her gaze sliding over Marie but not wanting to see her, a waxy smile on her face. _

"_Sure." The word came out so small Marie had to clear her throat and repeat it, "Sure, Mom."_

"_I'll throw them into the pies. Would you start on the dishes, please?"_

_Marie used to push the sliced peaches into the crusts while her mother held them steady on the table. _

"_Mm hm." She consented, moving to the sink carefully. Her path brought her three feet closer to her mother, who stood still and careful waiting for her to be far enough away again._

_In the past three days Marie had found herself moving as silent and soft as a ghost, like she was trying to not exist. Even now she was washing the dishes with motions so slow she hardly stirred the water. _

_At her back she felt her mother start to relax._

John feels something- a palm fluttering over his upper arm. He uses his teeth gently on the warm peach flesh of her shoulder. She shifts underneath him and John smoothes his lips across the mark he has just made.

_The song changed. C'est la ve by . _

_They used to sing that song together._

_She couldn't help it, she started to hum just a little under her breath. _

' "_C'est la ve, say the old folks, it goes to show you never can tell"'_

_Marie wasn't sure if her mother could hear her but the older woman actually started to hum a little too. Marie did a small dance step at the sink, as pleased by the slight lessening of tension as the song. Maybe it would be okay . . . _

"_Poop-" The displeasure in her mothers' voice caused the plate Marie was holding to slip from her fingers and make a dull clunk against the bottom of the sink. There was a sharp exhalation of annoyance behind her, "Baby, come hold this shell still for me."_

_Drying her hands hastily, Marie moved obediently toward her mother. _

_Taking over the job that used to be hers, she held the unbaked crusts still, keeping them from sliding away across the table as the peaches tumbled into them. It was a little awkward as she attempted to keep herself as small as possible, holding the elbow closest to her mother tight against her body. _

_The song continued around them. 'and the ice box was filled with tv dinners and ginger ale' _

_Her mother shook the last of the peaches into the final crust and Marie turned back toward the sink. _

"_Want to trim the crusts and cut the vents?" _

"_Yes." It wasn't much but any invitation to stay close for just a few more moments was welcome. _

"_Pinch the edges tight together." Her mother instructed quietly, the way she had done a hundred times before. _

"_Yes, ma'am." Marie answered, her lips curling as she gazed down. It used to drive her crazy, now it was reassuring- she was still Marie. This was still her mom. _

_They worked gently, still humming to the music that continued on cheerfully._

_It felt normal, as clean and uncomplicated as it had been just days ago. _

Rogues' fist tightens in the shirt at his shoulder and she murmurs something. John slides his fingers down her stomach, a thumb sliding under the band of her panties to knead her hip bone.

_When the pies were in the oven, her mother asked Marie to dig the cooling racks out of the cupboard. She got onto her knees, groping into the dimness for the wire racks when she heard a sudden exclamation of pain that brought her to her feet. _

"_What? What's the matter-" _

_They were right next to one another- and Marie reached out to where her mother clutched her bleeding finger. _

_With a sudden violent motion, the older woman jerked away- and got tangled up in her own feet somehow, falling back onto the floor with a thud. _

_There was a wounded animal, keening in Maries' chest-_

Johns' head hits the floor with a crack.

He stares up at the ceiling, one arm thrown wide and his breath shuddering in his chest.

Right back to the god damn_ beginning_, he thinks.

"What do you want from me?" Her voice comes from the bed above him and John sits up slowly. There is an ache all through him. Part of it is from hitting the floor, but most of it is from being so far from her when he was close just seconds ago.

She doesn't sound hysterical or desperate this time. She is dry and scarred and weary, all the passion drained out of her. Except for her lips that are flushed and swollen where he had kissed her.

They stare silently at each other for a moment.

"I'm done." He tells her.

John stands up stiffly, wearily and walks toward the door.

Behind him, Rogues' face drains of color.

"John."

He doesn't pause or hesitate. It's not in him.

"You've made some progress." He says, "I'm sure you and _ice man_ can figure the rest out."

"John-" Her voice is more desperate this time.

"I'll take you to the bus stop in the morning."

The door closes behind him.


	12. Chapter 12

A/N: It's been forever I know! But here I am, back again and ready to go. Please, be gentle. I'm out of practice. And thanks for your patience!

**Chap. 11-**

The next morning Rogue puts her gloves back on. Like manacles they chafe and irritate, dragging at her so that she moves slow and awkwardly. She can hardly bear to feel them against her skin. She places the last of her clothes deliberately into her duffel bag like it is actually important that each folded shirt and paired sock stay neat and wrinkle free. Rogue feels like a prisoner who has discovered that their pardon was really just a temporary reprieve.

John is waiting for her by the door. He doesn't seem impatient or eager and Rogue opens her mouth to plead with him maybe, to beg but she doesn't have any words. Her head falls and her hair covers her eyes as she settles her grip on her bag. Likewise, he won't look her in the eye. Shrugging his backpack onto his shoulders, John walks through the door without glancing back.

It turns out that Rogues' own rough homing device didn't lead her to the cabin in the most convenient way. There's a path. A journey that took her most of a day uphill can be achieved in a few hours if you follow the path. Rogue trails behind the pale expanse of skin between John's hair and the collar of his jacket, floating in front of her like the will-o-whisps from the stories her grandmother once told her. Floating through the darkness, without anchor or destination, the rest of him blends and shifts into the shadows of the woods around them until her eyes can barely pick him out. His shoulders become a low hanging branch, his foot the shadow cast by the heavy ferns. Rogue feels a panicky desire to reach out and wrap herself around him from behind, to feel his stomach take shape under her palms, to press her lips against that moonlight skin before her. But she can't even bring herself to form words. She has no right to touch him.

She has no right to touch anyone.

A couple hours into their hike, the trail opens out abruptly into a clearing. There's a shack on the far side with a rough garage door, heavily padlocked. Reaching into his pocket, John pulls out a key, unlocks the padlock and rolls the door back with a sharp gesture. Inside is an old Ford truck, as old and rickety looking as the shack it sits in. Rogue eyes it doubtfully.

"C'mon," John gestures impatiently for her to hand him her bag and she does. His fingers press against hers but the gloves are between them like a wall and it means nothing. He doesn't even pause, instead swinging the bag up into the back of the truck bed before throwing his own in after it. When he nods to the passenger side, Rogue walks around the front to tug at the stubborn passenger door. After two tries it comes free with a groan and she hauls herself up into the seat by the handle on the ceiling just over the passenger side window. What was it they used to call them in Mississippi? 'Oh shit' handles, she remembers. For the times when all you can do is hang on and say 'oh shit'.

They take the truck down an old logging trail to the base of the mountain. It is not that long of a ride but the sheer discomfort of it makes it seem long. Apparently, this particular model was never made with shocks, Rogue thinks as she clings to the aptly named handle. Without thinking, she turns to John to make the observation out loud but he is still staring straight ahead and she closes her mouth once again.

It is early afternoon when they reach town.

Pulling straight up to what Rogue recognizes as the bus station, John shuts off the ignition. There is a pause as he stares down at the steering wheel, gripped in his own white-knuckled hands. Watching him sideways, Rogue hardly dares to breathe, waiting for something she can hardly articulate to herself.

Then he gets out.

There is nothing she can do but follow, the half-formed hope disintegrating in her chest.

John pulls her bag out of the back and carries it inside rather than shoving it at her. She wonders if it is chivalry or if he is afraid that she will come back to the cabin if he doesn't personally deposit her on the bus. He steps inside, again without looking back. When she follows him, he's standing at the ticket window.

"One ticket to ( )". He says flatly to the old man behind the glass.

"One?" the man behind the counter asks, glancing at Rogue standing so close behind. She can feel her shoulders rounding and her body pulling in small, away from the world. She can only imagine how brittle she seems and wonders what she looks like to the man behind the counter. A guilty little sister? A rejected girlfriend? Certainly someone being sent home in disgrace.

John nods stiffly, "One."

"Okay." The old man answers mildly, reaching over to the printer beside him.

As John pulls out his wallet, the old man's eyes move to Rogue again and his gentle look brings a sudden lump to her throat. She swallows it roughly, brutally suppressing the sorrow in the way she has practiced so many times before. Tears and the words she couldn't think of earlier are there in her throat. Don't make me go. While John's back is still to her she rubs a quick hand across her eyes

Glancing down at the ticket in his hand, John turns back to the counter sharply, "This ticket is for four o'clock."

"Yessir." The old man agrees.

"That's not for another two hours."

He shrugs, "That's when the next bus comes. You missed the one o'clock. The four o'clock is the last bus going south for the day." He adds.

John stares at him for a long moment before turning away. Taking Rogue's bag from her slack hands he swings it over one shoulder, "C'mon." He grunts.

"Where are we going?" She manages as they hit the glass doors and emerge into the sun.

"I need supplies."

He visits the ATM first, stuffing a few hundred dollars into his wallet and Rogue wonders where the money comes from. Does the Brotherhood support his fugitive lifestyle? They must. But how? Bank robberies? Investment funds? Donation drives? Donate to the Brotherhood and get this stunning 'Mutant Supremacy' tote bag, she thinks a little hysterically. Rogue realizes that she might not be able to take another two hours of this. She moves to gnaw on a thumbnail and finds a glove in the way.

Their next stop is at an enormous box store that sells bulk foods and camping goods, obviously catering to hikers and isolated mountain types. John stalks up and down the rows, tossing things into the cart and ignoring Rogue as she trails behind him, invisible again. She ran away to find herself back where she started, wandering after some boy waiting to be touched . . .

"John," She hears her voice. When he doesn't turn, she tries again, "John-"

He pivots slowly, his face impassive as he meets her eyes for the first time since last night. He looks haggard, weary and angry because of it. The muscle in his jaw is set in stone, his eyes equally hard.

Rogue opens her mouth which is suddenly desert dry. "Why are you doing this?" She whispers, standing in front of a shelf of cereal that seems to reach to the sky.

"I'm not. You are."

Rogue opens her mouth to disagree but . . . but her heart is pounding so hard she is sure her body rocks with it and the motion seems to bring her close to him and then away again. To her horror she realizes that she just wants to wrap her arms around him and bury her face into his chest and weep into his shirt.

She has never, never wanted to cling to Bobby in this way.

Her hand starts to float up of its' own accord as he waits . . . when someone ahems from behind them. The moment snaps shut like a book closing and John pushes the cart forward so the person behind them can get through. Leaning against the shelf behind her, Rogue feels a few of the tears leak through.

He's got half the cart unloaded unto the conveyor when she catches up with him once again. "I need three 50 pound bags of mulch, too." He tells the girl behind the counter, without acknowledging Rogue. Nodding and snapping her gum loudly, the girl adds it to the tab.

"I can get that into your truck." The bag boy at the end of the conveyor offers. Without looking over, John reaches into his pocket and tosses his keys to the kid who barely catches them in time.

"I'll give you a hand." Rogue offers, pushing past John but managing not to touch him. She lets the bag boy, who is tall and skinny, lead her to a spot in front of the store where bags of mulch hide under an awning. On another day, she might have noticed the eager way he watched her, hoping for an opening to talk to her but her misery is blinding. But then again, maybe not. While they look to be about the same age, Rogue feels a thousand years older.

Swinging a bag up onto his shoulder, the boy gives her a bright smile. "Lead the way." And for the first time that day she does, wandering down the row of cars to where the rickety truck is parked. With his arms full of mulch, the boy can hardly be expected to open the tailgate, so Rogue holds her hand out for the keys. He drops them into her palm, looking quizzically at her gloved palm for a moment.

Unlocking the tailgate, she yanks on it sharply and swears under her breath when it refuses to budge. Just what she needs.

"I think-" The boy nods over to the other side of the gate where it is wired shut. The tailgate lock is as unreliable as the shocks, apparently. The boy smiles and moves to put the bag on the ground but Rogue waves him off.

"I've got it." She says wearily and moves to unwind the rusty tangle – it's clear the gate hasn't been down in a while-

"So, did you and your brother just move here or-" The bag boy's voice distracts her for a moment and Rogue glances up.

"What?" The knot slips suddenly and a sharp heavy piece of wire pops free, slicing through her glove and into the skin of her hand. "Ahhh-"

Lowering the box to the ground, the boy moves toward her, "Oh, ouch." He winces, "Here, let me take a look-"

A voice far in the background calls, "Hey, Andy-"

Rogue steps back but that puts her right up against the truck and he reaches forward grabbing her hand gently, peeling back the torn glove so that they met skin on skin. All the repressed emotion of the day, not to mention the pain and adrenaline from the cut launches out of Rogue and as desperately as she fights it, she isn't fast enough. He crumples almost immediately, still gripping her hand. Rogue follows, sliding to her knees as a wave of dizziness sweeps over her.

_His name is Andy Wilkenson. He thinks she is pretty and he hopes that she has moves here. He is trying to imagine what classes they might have together and the best way to ask her out. He has one sister, younger and he loves her very much. He is afraid of spiders but he hides it well. His parents are kind-_

Rogue yanks her hand back sharply and then moves to cup his head when the convulsions start. There is a voice in the background, terrified and frantic . . . Andy's eyes roll back in his head and he goes rigid before slumping into unconsciousness. Someone grabs her by the arm, pulling her back so that she falls against the asphalt. John is at her elbow instantly, lifting her up. When she has her feet underneath her, he tugs gently on her elbow, trying to get her to move. But she is staring down in horror at what she has done.

The other bag boy kneels beside his friend, frantically trying to revive him. Glancing up at Rogue, he demands, "What did you do?! Andy! Andy! Man, answer me!" A crowd is starting to gather, people drifting over, abandoning open truck doors and half unloaded carts to circle them.

"Rogue," John says insistently to her, "We need to go. Now."

She shakes her head numbly, "No. I have to- I have to help him-" Yes. She has to help him. She falls to her knees beside the two boys, "It's like a seizure." She explains, "You need to-" When she reaches out, the other boy slaps her hand away.

"Don't touch him! You did this! I saw you! You touched him-"

"No. I-"

"What are you?!"

The answer is in the air suddenly. Mutant. The crowd of people surges forward. The generally blameless and ordinary faces of regular people- neighbors and teachers and church goers and dentists twists into something ugly.

John grabs her by the arm and hauls her to her feet.

"Call the sheriff." Someone says. There is a murmur of something among the angry accusing faces. A rock clangs against the side of the truck, leaving a dent. Rogue jumps, turning, trying to find where the rock came from but all she sees are faces full of hate.

John steps forward between her and the crowd, raising one hand out of which fire blossoms like a nova. It forms a shield between them and the angry people.

"Back off." He growls.


	13. Chapter 13

"Her eyes- she's on the dark side"

-Angel –Massive Attack

**Chap. 12-**

The crowd moves back a little, gasps and shrieks peppering the mass of people. Their fear stands out in sharp contrast to their hatred which seems only to have grown harder and sharper. What had begun as a crowd has become a mob.

Shaking, Rogue glances over at John's face and feels alarm swell inside her. She says his name, trying to distract him before he does anything that can not be taken back; "John-" For a moment Rogue's fear _of_ the crowd is replaced by fear_ for_ the crowed.

But he's not obviously furious; instead he's gone cold all over, in a way she's only seen once before. "Get your bag." John instructs her flatly.

Pulling her eyes away from his barren face, Rogue nods unsteadily. She reaches into the truck bed and wrestles her bag free. John begins to back up, the wall of fire keeping pace with him and in its wake, the crowd surges like a tide.

John herds Rogue behind him, his one free hand gripping her sleeve. When they are clear of the rows of cars, John reaches into his pocket and says over his shoulder, "Cover your eyes."

Disobeying him seems impossible. She tucks her face into her elbow but she can still see the lightning blast at the edges of her vision and feel the _whoosh_ of . . . something. She looks up hastily to find the mob lying like fallen dominoes on the ground.

John strengthens his grip on her arm and drags her away, towing her along with an iron grip that refuses to loosen, while Rogue stares over her shoulder at what he has done. At what they have done.

Two blocks away, hidden from view in an alleyway, he releases her abruptly and she stumbles a little, falling against a crate.

Looking up at him, she demands, "What did you do?" Horrified by his sudden turn to violence.

"It was a flashbomb." He explains in disgust. "Not that they don't deserve-"

"_Why did you do that?!"_ She screams at him, seeing in her head the people, all those everyday people looking dead on the ground.

"I did it for _you_! To protect _you_!" He takes one step closer, more discomposed than she has ever seen him. Again she has no idea what he might do- when there is a sound like a little thundercrack and John pauses, unable to cross the space between them. He looks momentarily confused, frowning gently at her before his eyes roll back in his head and he slips down to the dirty concrete.

"Get back!" A voice snarls at Rogue and a hand shoves her away roughly. Her elbow slams into the concrete as she falls but she rolls as she has been taught and manages not to hit her head. Looking up she can see a murky form looming over John's prone body. If not for the brown deputy's uniform and the wink of the badge on his chest she would hardly have recognized the figure as human, his face is so warped with fear and hate. Mouth open, eyes stretched wide, hands shaking, he bends over John, pausing only long enough to kick him roughly in the side. The blow produces nothing, not even a grunt from the boy on the ground and the look of dissatisfaction on the man's face that he can not see or hear evidence of Johns' pain makes bile rise up in Rogue's throat. He murmurs something over John and the hard darkness in his hand drifts upwards. Underneath its' shadow the mutant boy stirs weakly.

Rogue lunges.

She grabs the human deputy with the hand laid bare by the torn glove and hangs on grimly to the patch of skin at his naked elbow, deaf to the crack of the gunshot over her head. It is worse than anything she has ever imagined- like swimming in sewage, burning and gagging and she hates her skin for existing and giving her the sensation of being engulfed by it. And his voice in her head-

_Deputy Wayne Smythe. Even in his own head, he thought of himself as Deputy. He loved his badge, his shiny shiny badge that he thought nothing could sully. His badge that made everything right. He was the law and this freak, this perversion of nature had threatened the order of his world. Hate. Hate. Hate. Hate. Hate. His insides rang and dripped with it, a corroded set of tunnels like the sewers under the streets you saw in movies. Kill it. His voice growled and snarled in the claustrophobic passageways. Erase it. The only way to make things right was to make_ it_ not exist anymore. Hate-_

Rogue rips her hand away as he falls and she stumbles across the alley, vomiting up what little she has in her stomach until there is nothing but bile left and then nothing at all. She still feels dirty, her insides rolling and trying desperately to reject the poison crawling between her bones, saturating the spaces under her skin. Before she can stop herself she rushes to the deputy's side and kicks him as he had kicked John, feeling the tears pouring down her face like they are trying to wash her clean. "God damn you." She sobs, "God _damn_ you."

A few feet away John moans and she throws herself to her knees beside him. There is so much blood. Blood everywhere. How can he be alive underneath it all?

She is kneeling in a lake of it. "John-" Nothing but a cracking sound comes out of her and she swallows, trying to wet her throat enough to speak, "John-"

His eyes come open and he stares up at her. Without his usual mocking disdain he looks so young. Just kids, a voice in her head observes. We shouldn't have to do this.

Pausing a moment for him to become John again and to say something sharp and tell her what to do gets her nothing.

Voices rise up in her instead, cold voices familiar with moments of horror and blood. She has worked so hard to keep space clear in her head but right now she is just grateful that someone, _something_ knows what to do. Stop the bleeding, they tell her. So she tears a section of the lining out of her coat and presses it to the hole in his shoulder and then fashions a quick bandage to keep it in place. A burst of static explodes out of the radio on the deputy's shoulder and Rogue jumps toward it, ripping the black box off his uniform to smash it against the cement. She pounds it against the ground again and again until it is just shards in her hand. Then she takes his gun as well, pulling it apart and casting the pieces away in the alley. He won't wake up for days, maybe weeks after the way she has torn at him but she refuses to take chances. When she leans back over him she notices something else, the glint of car keys slipping out of his pocket.

The voices instruct her again. Snatching up the car keys she bends back down toward John. With her gloved hand she smoothes his hair back from his eyes which have fallen closed, "John." He opens them a little quicker this time. "We have to go." She repeats his words to him, "Now." She isn't sure how aware he is but he isn't entirely dead weight when she manages to get her shoulder under his arm and drag him to his feet. They stumble together toward the county sheriff's car parked at the mouth of the alleyway.

Rolling quietly through the back alleys of the town in their stolen vehicle, Rogue tries desperately not to draw attention. When they reach the highway though, she opens the car up, pushing it as fast as she dares down and out of the mountains. In the seat beside her, John lays with his head back, his breathing either inaudible or rasping in his chest. His face is waxy pale.

He needs a doctor.

And they need to get rid of this car, something in her head observes.

"We need to ditch this car," John agrees unsteadily from the passenger seat and startled, Rogue glances over at him, "There's a rest area a few miles from here. It's a good spot."

Rogue nods, "Okay." Eyeing him sideways, she adds softly, "You need a doctor."

Lips twisting, he agrees shortly, "Yeah. Get us to Fresno. There's a tattoo place called Doctor Willys' of Cornell by the airport. . ." His voice trails off and she's looks over at him in a panic.

"John!" He stirs a little but doesn't answer and Rogue leans hard on the gas.

They reach the rest area in record time and she parks the cruiser at the far edge of the parking lot. There are a few cars in the lot but Rogue sits frozen. She realizes she has no idea how to steal a car. The voices inside her know how though. She finds herself leaning over John's unconscious lap to paw through the glove compartment but doesn't find what she's looking for. Frowning she leans even farther over and spots the shine of a heavy mag-lite flashlight on the floor. She grabs it up, feeling the heft of it in her hand. Then she reaches into John's pocket for his knife. There is a permanent marker in the console between them and she tucks that away as well.

Scooting down in the seat, she stares out at the other cars, assessing, but doesn't see what she's looking for. When a sedan pulls in and a family, complete with dog, two kids, and a picnic basket pours out, she knows she's found what she has been looking for. Dad and kids disappear into the bathrooms while Mom and dog continue on around the building to the picnic area in back. Rogue waits exactly fifteen minutes, long enough for everyone to go to the bathroom and to unpack the picnic basket and be sure they don't need to go back to the car for anything they have forgotten.

Rogue slides out of the car, "I'll be right back," she promises John though he is still unconscious. She walks across the lot as naturally as she can and slides the flashlight down in her hand so that she holds it by the thicker end that contains the bulb. Without pausing she swings it into the back seat window. The sound of glass smashing is like a bomb but Rogue can't stop. Popping the driver's door lock she slides into the car, letting that something else which seems gruff and terse like Logan, take over. Rip open dash. These wires, here and here. Strip. Twist. Insert knife. Turn. The car roars to life and Rogue backs out of the spot and drives across the lot to where she has left John in the cruiser.

When she gets him out of the car she winces at the blood stain he has left on the seat. She glances past the wire mesh into the backseat but it's a police cruiser and there are no helpfully discarded jackets she could use to cover the pool. Laying down the passenger side seat, she manages to transfer John to it. He looks worse than ever but he opens his eyes a little when she drops him onto the seat. "What are you doing?" He asks fuzzily.

"Stealin' a car." She answers distractedly. "Jes a secon'."

Crouching at the back of the car, she uses the marker to change a zero to an eight, a 'd' to a 'b', and an 'e' to another 'b'. She studies the license plate for a second. It's not the best disguise but it will have to do. Please don't let it rain, she thinks desperately.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chap. 13-**

The windows of the shop are barred and the sign over the door is dented. Trash blows up and down a street populated with businesses that advertise triple X services and cheap liquor. The few figures within sight are gray shadows that acknowledge nothing of the world around them as though they are walking through a pointless dream. If there had been time for it, Rogue would have been horrified at the idea of seeking help in a neighborhood like this. Instead, she bypasses the empty spaces in front of the shop, circling the block quickly to pull the car to a jolting halt in the alleyway.

There is a steel security door opening onto the alley and she throws herself out of the car and around the front end toward it. She pounds the flaking paint with one fist. When there is no answer, she pounds harder and faster. "Open up, damn you!" Wishing to god, she could just rip the metal open with her bare fists.

She waits for a hasty count of ten and then runs down the alley, out onto the sidewalk and crashes through the front door of the shop. Without stopping, she throws herself toward the first upright body she sees.

Panting and desperate, she says, "I need help." To the tall young man behind the counter.

He raises a dry eyebrow. "Yeah? This look like a charitable organization to you?"

There have been too many obstacles today, too many horrible bloody moments, and too too long sitting beside John listening to his breathing grow shallow. Rogue can't fight what happens next. She sees herself lunge across the counter and grip his shirt collar just under his smirking grin. Then she slams his face down onto the glass. "Listen Bub," She growls, inches from his face, "you're gonna help me right now or I'm gonna-"

A hand floats down to settle on her sleeve, "There's no need for that." A voice chides gently.

Rogue turns snarling like a cat and stops short, looking up into a face that is the picture of calm. A face like Professor Xavier's, wise and patient. Glancing down at the hand resting so gently on her sleeve, she feels quick surprise and then shame.

"My name is William Percy Randall," The man tells her quietly, "but people call me Doc." He untangles her gloved hand from the young man's shirt and then frees it like a bird, "What can we do for you?" The skin across the knuckles of Doc's hand is a deep night black but when he turns that hand over his palm is almost as pale as her own. He is tall with a thin rangy frame that speaks to the young man he once was.

He is not what she expected.

Rogue backs away from the young man reluctantly, "I- we need help. John's hurt. He said we could trust you . . ."

Doc's expression sharpens, "John?"

"Pyro." She whispers.

"Where is he?"

"I left him in the car, in the alley. He was too heavy-"

"Davey," Doc snaps at the young man who is sulking behind the counter and rubbing his reddened cheek sullenly, "Get the stretcher." Davey seems inclined to argue until Doc growls, "Now, boy." He crosses to the front of the shop and flips the sign to 'Closed', turns the deadbolt, and yanks on the cord of the blinds so that they fall shut with a steely rattle.

"Show me." Doc says, turning to Rogue and nodding toward the side door. She moves around the counter and through the small room behind it but has to pause again at the locked door. The older man pulls a set of keys out of his pocket and unlocks the padlock quickly. Stepping into the alley, he hurries to the car and opens the passenger side door to kneel beside John.

Someone pushes past Rogue and she steps out of the way automatically. She has been away from John for three minutes and even those brief moments have been enough to give her fresh eyes. He looks dead already. Grey faced, limp, and washed with sweat and blood. Doc pats his cheek gently. "John."

There is no response.

The older man peels the makeshift bandage away from his shoulder to study the wound impassively. Then he looks up at Rogue. "How long ago did this happen?"

"Three hours." She says feeling ashamed that she could not help him better, get him here faster. It is all her fault. A fist closes over her, compressing her heart and forcing her breath as thin as Johns.

"Johnny!" The Doc strikes him harder, his hand making a meaty sound against John's cheek. Still nothing. "Davey," He motions the young man forward with the stretcher. Together, they lay it out on the ground and transfer John to it as gently as possible before hustling him inside. Rogue trails behind shutting the side door and bolting it absently. As they disappear around the corner, the bones seem to fall out of her and she slips down to the floor.

She never thought they would make it. She thought he would die. So many times, she leaned over, stretching her fingers out to touch him and make sure he was still warm. And he kept getting cooler and cooler. . .

Pushing herself to her feet she follows where they had disappeared into the back. She has to keep watching him.

In the very back room, there is a hole in the floor. It's out of place not to mention unsafe and so she has to believe that the hole isn't always there. Doc has a hidden staircase. The staircase leads to a hidden basement which turns out to be some kind of medical facility. In her haste and horror all she gets is an impression- white mottled linoleum squares on the floor and a low ceiling set with white panels that buzz with florescent lights. On the far side of the room the ceiling is set with three tracks from which hang heavy curtains. To her left is a doorway into another room that might be an examination room, considering the row of plastic chairs lined up outside of it.

They have John on a table in the middle of the large space like they didn't want to waste even the little amount of time it would have taken to push him through that other doorway. Doc is bent over him. Davey keeps watch from a few feet away, gloved and apron-ed. A wheeled tray of supplies sits at his elbow. Doc's back is to Rogue and she can't see what's happening but she can hear things. Wet sounds, rustling, the soft clang of metal instruments. Neither Doc nor Davey speak but the younger man reaches out to offer a tool from the tray or to provide a third hand every few moments, as though he just _knows_ when it is needed. Perhaps they have worked together for so long words are unnecessary. Or maybe there is another explanation.

Rogue moves around, treading the edges of the room as though afraid to disturb them. The scene unfolds before her and she instantly wishes she hadn't moved. The horrible wound is laid bare on the table and John is hardly in evidence under it, as though that bloody torn place has grown so big as to swallow him. Sitting down heavily in one of the waiting chairs, Rogue presses her hand to her mouth. It's obscene that he should be so damaged, that anything should be allowed to hurt him like that.

The erratic beeping that Rogue had hardly noticed in the background stops abruptly, replaced by a shrill panicked note that sets the two men scrambling. "Epi." Doc demands shortly and a long needle is offered up. Doc plunges it into John's chest and both men pause, waiting for the electronic shriek to stop.

It continues. Two paddles are produced out of nowhere and Doc holds them out so Davey can squirt some clear gel onto them. Doc works it between the two paddles like mason with a trowel full of cement before applying them to John's chest. "Clear." He says tersely.

John's body bucks underneath the paddles then falls down against the mattress with a thud. Rogue's head snaps back as though something has struck her. The machine continues to scream in warning.

"Again."

John convulses and falls again.

Inside her chest there is a feeling like straining toward a balloon string that is flying out of reach. She gropes for that thread that connects the two of them-

Nothing.

"Higher?" Davey asks.

"Not working." Doc replies, casting the paddles aside. He pulls off the latex gloves that cover his hand as Davey protests.

"It's too much. You can't-"

"No time to argue. Step back."

Even with half his face covered, Rogue can see his reluctance but he steps back.

Hiding her eyes in one gloved hand away from the sight of John's still form, Rogue says a desperate prayer. Please, she thinks, _please_, don't-. Even in her own head, she can't finish the sentence. Too afraid that just thinking it might somehow make it irrevocable. With her head down and her whole body clenched like a fist around that desperate prayer, it takes a moment for the glow to reach her. Something is happening on the table. When she looks up she can see it, a warm light growing between Doc's palms as he holds his arms extended over John. The glow reaches a critical mass and the man turns his hands palms down and the light sifts down, tiny little falling stars, that swirl and spread until John is ablaze. Then the light sinks into him, enfolded into his skin, sinking farther down yet so that for a second Rogue thinks she can see John's bones shinning through.

The gentle beeping starts again, sweet and steady.

Rouge takes a shuddering breath, as that something comes rushing back to fill the echoing place inside her.

Then the light is gone and Doc slumps against the table.

Davey moves around the table toward him but Doc waves him off. "Do we have any of the O special left?" He asks the younger man who shakes his head no.

Doc nods grimly, "Finish it up, then. I'll check on him in a few hours."

When he pushes away from the table his eyes land on Rogue, her pale face upturned and awed. "Will he be okay?" She asks and her eyes are wide and frightened, the little girl she barely had time to be showing through.

He sinks into the chair beside her, his bones more prominent than before and age clear in his face, "We've dealt with the wound as best we can. It can heal if given time." He looks her in the eye solemnly, "Our concern now is the blood loss and shock he's suffered. His system has been . . . depleted. I've bolstered it as much as I can. Now we just have to wait and watch."

"Can I stay with him?"

"Let Davey finish up the bandages and you can sit with him as long as you like." Doc studies her for a moment and despite his obvious weariness asks, "Are you hurt?" Their eyes both fall to the torn glove, stiff with blood, that slashes across her palm. He reaches forward and Rogue withdraws her hand quickly before he can touch her.

"Thank you." She says, "But it's not safe. My skin-" She is too tired to explain it to him but he seems to understand.

"There are some bandages in the cabinet over there." He nods toward a row of cupboards behind Davey, "Second from the right on the top."

"Thank you." She repeats softly, wishing she could offer him something more than that.

Standing stiffly, he nods, "You're welcome . . ." He pauses.

"Marie."

That makes him smile, "Marie."

Eventually, Davey finishes the bandages and pushes John's gurney into one of the three curtained alcoves along the far wall. He hooks John up to some monitors and then nods to Rogue. "We'll be upstairs if you need anything." Surprised that he would offer her even this little reassurance after what she had done earlier, Rogue nods back and smiles a little in return.

She pulls a chair over and it squeaks nauseatingly on the linoleum floor. Wincing, she glances over at John as though that might actually wake him and then shakes her head a little at her own stupidity. Rogue fusses with the chair longer than is necessary, angling it to the left a half inch and then another half inch, avoiding the moment when she has to look at John lying wounded in this bed.

It doesn't take long before her little ploy wears thin, though. With a steadying breath, Rogue lowers herself to the chair, settling as softly as a flower. Raising her head, her eyes fall to John's face. His skin is as pale as the sheet that lays over him. The hole in his shoulder has been covered by a bandage much neater than her own and all of the precious blood he lost has been washed away. He is as neat and tidy as a corpse. Only the constant beeping of the machine at her shoulder and the faint warm place in her own chest reassure her.

Sitting in twin pools of shadow his eyes are sunken and bruised. She reaches out to touch his face but stops. She can't even- A perfect spot appears on the sheet near his elbow and she wipes the corners of her eyes roughly. Her cheek comes to rest on the bed just centimeters away from his finger tips. She stares up his arm, seeing his chest and chin and nose as a mountain range. Her eyes shut. I'm sorry, John, she mouths, her eyes still tight against the tears. I'm sorry. She draws in a ragged breath that wants to become a sob and sits back up. Taking his hand into her gloved ones, she smoothes his fingers to curl around her own. Then covering his hand with her own, she presses her lips against the back of her own glove. Dissatisfied, she lowers his hand back to the bed, pulling the sheet across it. She lowers her mouth to the thin cotton and can at least feel the heat of his skin and wonders if he feels anything trapped in the dark.

Crossing her arms on the bed she lays her head back down again. Before her eyes close once more, she thinks, _I am so far gone_.

--

A/N: Once more I have to give it up to Randa Beth! I was feeling a little stuck until I read 'Spark' and suddenly felt much better. If you haven't read it yet, why not? What are you a bad person or something?


	15. Chapter 15

"Every now and then I know

You're the only boy who wanted me to be as I am" -Total Eclipse of the Heart

**Chap. 14-**

Three thousand miles away, in the rec room on the third floor of the mansion, Bobby reclines idly, his legs stretched out in front of him and the fingers of his free hand twined with Kitty's. There is a neglected college text lying on the couch in front of him as he flips through channels on the giant T.V. Beside him Kitty reads quietly, engrossed in the physics book open on her lap.

When the clicking continues past the normal amount of time, Kitty glances up, smiling at his distracted face, "That chapter's not going to read itself, you know."

Thumb still moving, he looks over and smiles back ruefully, "I can't think about the historical significance of communism anymore- at least for a little while." Watching her intently, his head tilts to the side. The corner of his mouth curving up, his eyes grow wicked, "I can think of some activities that would refresh my brain though, so I would be even sharper when I return to studying."

"Oh, ya?" Closing her book, Kitty leans toward him with a similar smile. She raises one eyebrow, "What kind of activities?"

"Well-" Something on the T.V. tugs at his attention and he looks away for a moment.

_Breaking News_! The garish announcement lashes across the news station he has landed on by accident. "This just in," announces the anchor woman seriously, "Reports are coming in from a small town in Northern California of a potential act of mutant terrorism. In the town of White Ridge located in the foothills of the Sierra Madres, 14 people were injured in an explosion in the parking lot of the local Camp Co. Witnesses say the explosion was preceded by an incident involving two unidentified mutants, male and female and the store's bag boy whose name is being witheld pending investigation. Another employee of the store claims that the young woman touched the boy causing him to seize and then fall into a coma. A Sheriff's Deputy was also found comatose in an alleyway several streets away from the site of the original incident-"

"Rogue-" Bobby whispers, rising from the couch.

Even as he begins to move away from her, Kitty grips his hand, "Bobby-"

But he shakes her off and is through the door to the hall, shouting "Logan! We've found her!"

--

For two days, Rogue hardly leaves John's side. He is out of her eyesight only when she goes to the bathroom. She thinks to eat only when Doc brings her a plate and insists that she take some nourishment. She would have continued to sleep sitting at John's bedside with her crossed arms and head leaning on his mattress if Doc hadn't secured her a cot. She doesn't want to use it but again he insists so she lays down and closes her eyes. When the older man shuts off the light and is gone up the stairs, she gets up and moves the cot so it is pressed up against John's bed, so that she can hear his breathing even in her sleep.

"Why won't he wake up?" She asks Doc at the end of the first twenty four hours.

"Sometimes, in a case like John's, the body just needs to rest. He'll wake up when his body is ready."

He says 'when' not 'if'.

It is thin comfort in the dim hours of darkness when she lies awakened by nightmares and straining for the gentle in and out of his breath. But it is all she has to cling to. That and the faint taut pull on that string tied under her heart.

At the end of the second day, Doc examines John again, pressing his palm to John's forehead and closing his eyes like he is listening to something in the distance. When he opens his eyes, Rogue is watching him hungrily.

"He's doing better." He tells her.

"Why isn't he awake yet?"

"These things take time," He reminds her and she nods. Glancing down at John's smooth closed face, she just catches Doc slight frown when he thinks she can't see it. But when she looks back up quickly, his face is impassive. "Marie, will you run upstairs and grab my bag? I left it on the table in my office." He prompts when she hesitates. "Please?"

"Okay," She agrees, standing reluctantly, her eyes still clinging to John.

Doc watches her feet disappear up the stairs before turning back to the young man on the cot. He rests his chin in his palm and asks softly, "What are you up to, Johnny?"

--

On the third day, Rogue finds herself almost frantic with impatience. It's been building slowly over the long hours of the strange days, fueled by too little sleep and too much guilt. She attempts to channel the energy. She has cleaned everything within reach and some things she had to climb onto chairs to get to. She has counted all the tiles in the ceiling and calculated the number of checkerboard squares in the floor and rearranged the linen closet. John still won't wake up.

She had thought all she had to worry about was him dying.

Now she is terrified he might live but never wake up.

Some people would consider this state an improvement, she knows. At least he doesn't talk in his sleep.

Rogue paces across the floor quickly, reaching the far wall then turning back sharply. "What's your problem?!" She demands to John's sleeping form. Then she answers her own question, "You are _such_ an _asshole_!" And is instantly wracked with guilt.

Rushing back to his bedside, she falls into the chair beside him. She opens her mouth to apologize to him before realizing how ridiculous that is. He can't hear her, right? But she whispers, "Sorry," anyway.

She can't shake the feeling that he is punishing her. Or someone is.

All her fault. Again.

She shoved her way back into his life, disturbed his solitude until he had to shove back. Had to drag her back into the world and away from him. And then because she is so inept she can't even walk across a parking lot safely, he was forced to protect her.

Why did he do that?

He should have just run away, back to the mountains.

Interrupting her musings, Doc wanders down the stairs, his long limbs gliding along easily, two paper lunch bags in either hand. He smiles at her, "I came to check on our patient,". Handing her one of the bags when he comes within arms reach, he insists, "Eat something. We can't have you getting sick as well."

She opens the bag dutifully and smiles at the bottle of sweet tea inside, dewy and cold. "Thank you," She tells him as she twists the cap off. The last thing she is, is hungry but his kindness is touching. Nibbling the sandwich he brought her to avoid an argument, Rogue watches Doc examine John as he has done for the last few days, his hands gentle and steady. She envies him that touch.

"How do you know John?" She asks suddenly.

Doc glances up, surprised, from where he is measuring John's pulse, two of his fingers pressed to the inside of Johns' wrist.

"I'm afraid that is a matter of doctor-patient privilege." He tells her with a smile.

"Your office is in the basement of a tattoo parlor."

"Doesn't matter. The rules are the rules everywhere." He looks at her from under concerned brows and changes the subject suddenly, "You might consider resting a little yourself," Then he looks back down, studying the I.V. in John's arm too intently, "I'm sure all of this has been hard on you as well."

She shrugs, stubbornly. She'll rest when she's sure John is okay.

"How is your hand?" He asks, nodding toward the bandage.

Still not healed. Like John, her body is taking time to heal itself. Longer than usual.

"Fine." She answers.

"You never told me what happened."

"I cut it on a wire. . ."

Doc gives her a disappointed look, "That's not what I meant. How did this happen?" He sums up the damage to John, the bullet hole and bruises and lost blood and her exhausted nightmare wracked body with a wave of his hand.

When he sees her reluctance to answer, he repeats, "Doctor-patient privilege. You have my word what is said between us will stay between us."

Rogue toys absently with the cap in hand, clicking the metal top to hear the popping sound. Click-pop, click-pop, click-pop. There's something familiar about it. The sandwich Doc brought her is lying forgotten by her elbow.

"We went into town for . . . for supplies. There was an accident in the parking lot. A boy touched me. I hurt him without meaning to and when I stopped to help him everything went-" There is pressure behind her eyes, in her throat, on her ears. "everything went wrong," She whispers around the tears struggling to free themselves. "John was only trying to defend me and-"

Doc has moved around the side of John's bed and he reaches out to touch her shoulder, covered by the material of her shirt. She flinches when his fingertips land on her shoulder bone and that motion is enough to dislodge it all- the pain and fear and guilt.

Rogue turns, throwing her arms around Doc's waist and pressing her face to his breast bone. His arms circle her gently, careful not to touch bare skin.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She sobs over and over again, in gasping, gulping, keening sobs. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault, little one." Doc soothes her, his fingers spread wide across her back. "It's alright. Shhh . . . It's alright."


	16. Chapter 16

"I used to be a warrior,

Throwing punches at the night air"

-Throwing Punches --Collin Herring

**Chap. 15-**

Doc insists on giving her something to help her sleep- without dreams, he promises. Rogue doesn't want to take it. She's so in the habit of arguing with John, it's hard to acquiesce to anyone. But Doc argues that she can be of no use to Pyro in her current state and the truth is, she exactly as exhausted as she looks. So weary from crying and desperate for some kind of oblivion, Rogue agrees and sleeps eight continuous hours without nightmares. For the first time in years it seems.

When the time comes to wake, she rises slowly out of that warm place, just aware of herself as a body and not much else. No swirling thoughts or sickening guilt, just blood moving sweetly through the veins, heartbeat steady and unhesitating. She can feel her muscles, warm and soft, feel her bones lying gentle. Rolling onto her side, Rogue presses her face into her pillow unwilling to leave that safe sleepy place just yet when she feels some resistance on her arm, her fingers tangled in something. She opens her eyes a little and finds her hand entwined in John's- gloved finger, bare finger, gloved finger tucked together. Looking up from their joined hands, there is John, his eyes open and on her face. His lips move soundlessly and she can just make out the words, 'still here'.

Then he smiles at her. And it is as warm and sweet and safe as the dreamy place she has just left.

Before his eyes close again.

Rogue lays on her side, feeling his fingers go softly, softly slack in hers before his hand falls away and she can push the blankets off her legs. John is still, with his face toward hers, and his chest moves in the steady rhythm of sleep, not unconsciousness. Sitting up, a shudder goes through Rogue and she tilts her face up toward the sky she knows lies beyond the ceiling. "Thank you." She says, to whatever might be listening. "Thank you."

Then she slides off the cot, before tugging it away from John's bedside. Crossing to the intercom on the wall, she presses the button. "He's awake." She says into the speaker.

Awake. When did that become the most beautiful word in the English language?

Moments later, Doc comes hurrying down the stairs.

"He went back to sleep." Rogue tells him apologetically.

"That happens. It may take a few days for him to stay awake for any length of time. Well, then," He moves to stand over John and watches him quietly for a moment, "let's see what we can see."

Doc checks John's vitals, adjusts the drip of his I.V. bag, and then holds his hands gently hovering over the young man's sleeping form. John doesn't stir as the golden light blooms and fades but when Doc looks up he gives Rogue another reassuring smile. "He's on the mend. Soon, he'll be his usual charming self." He pulls a chair up toward the bed and settles into it. "I think I'll wait with you awhile, if that's okay. Until he wakes up again." He looks her up and down gently, "Maybe, you'd like to get something to eat. I can watch-"

"No." She interrupts him, "I'll wait, too."

It takes about an hour, in which Rogue can not sit still. She flutters restlessly around the room, picking things up, putting them down. She sweeps the floor, refolds the linens in the linen closet. Straightens the chairs against the wall. Every few minutes she wanders back to check on John. Wisely, Doc says nothing. Taking up the day's newspaper he applies himself to it peacefully while Rogue rearranges his clinic around him.

As predicted, John wakes up his usual charming self, "Why's it so freaking cold in here?" He complains vaguely.

Rogue appears instantly, "I-" she says, "You-"

John looks at her fuzzily. "I could set the bed on fire."

"No!" She turns hastily, "I'll get you another blanket." Hurrying over to the closet that contains linens, Rogue grabs a blanket off a shelf and rushes back. Unfurling the blanket in one motion she lets it settle over him. "Better?" She asks.

"Mmmm." Is all the answer she gets before his eyes close again. He's not asleep though, he's just used to having his eyes closed. The difference is clear in the way his finger move vaguely against the blankets as though searching for something. Lowering the paper to his lap, Doc watches for a moment and then resumes his reading. Hovering, Rogue waits anxiously for another sign of consciousness and feels a soft tap on her arm. Looking down she sees part of the paper resting against her forearm. Signing, she takes Doc's offering and settles into the chair beside him.

When John decides to open his eyes the next time, Doc sets his paper aside, "Hello Johnny." He says softly.

"Don't call me that, old man." John answers. His eyes slide past Doc to Rogue and his gaze is clearer now, though his thoughts are the usual mystery.

"How do you feel?" She asks softly, drifting toward him again.

"Like someone punched a hole in my chest."

Rogue recoils a little but nods, "Someone did."

Eyelids falling shut, he's asleep again.

It continues that way for the next couple of days, though each day John manages to stay awake for longer periods of time. His temper remains somewhat . . . erratic, however.

It starts with little barbs. Comments tossed at Rogue's back or her partially hidden face. Remarks too small to challenge but still sharp- sharp enough to cut. Rogue takes each one with stoic silence. Her fault- her penance, she figures. There is a hole in his chest, as John had so elegantly reminded her when he woke up.

It's their fifth day with the doctor- two days after John had awoken from his coma and from her chair in the corner of the clinic, Rogue hides her furtive staring with a book clutched in absent fingers. Doc is examining John once again. The young mutant's shirt is off and Rogue drinks in the sight of his skin exposed to the harsh light of the basement. The mark on his shoulder is knitting together but hasn't disappeared yet. When he takes a deep breath at Doc's prompting, she breathes deeply too, feeling the miracle in the motion.

When John glances towards her though, her head is down, face directed at the book in her hands. He watches her, staring past Doc's quiet instructions- breathe deeply, lift your arm, squeeze my hand- Rogue doesn't look up.

"I never pegged you for a car thief." Says a cold voice from the table.

"What?" Rogue asks absently and Doc slows in his examination.

"You stole a car." John answers her coldly.

"Two of them." She agrees, eyes still on the pages.

"Careful- they might not let you back into the clubhouse. Stealing police cruisers isn't exactly in the good little mutant's rulebook."

She shrugs, setting the book aside finally, "We needed it."

"Open your mouth and say 'Ahh'." Doc demands, stepping between them before John can answer back.

John does not open his mouth and say 'Ahh'.

"Fine. Do you want something for the pain?" Doc moves on to fuss with the I.V. bag.

Again John doesn't answer, giving the older man a look that says, 'What do _you_ think?'.

"Okay, tough guy." Doc acquiesces mildly. When John turns toward Rogue once more, the older man sticks a needle into the I.V. anyway.

"Bastar-" John manages before passing out.

Rogue is surprised, "You told him you wouldn't give it to him."

"No, I didn't." Doc spends a minute tidying up the work tray beside John's bed, "He's healing quickly. That high body temperature of his is useful in that respect. But he was healing quicker when he was asleep. If I keep him under tonight, he'll be on his feet tomorrow. Two days after that he could be ready to travel."

Doc can see the color draining from Rogue's face.

When he's better, will he try to send her away again?

"What will you do?" He asks her softly.

"I don't know."

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

John wakes up pissed.

The next morning, Rogue hits the intercom as Doc had instructed her when she sees John begin to stir so that the older man is standing at his bedside when he opens his eyes.

"I was unconscious for three days! How much more fucking sleep do you think I need?!" He snarls at Doc, immediately ripping the I.V. out of his arm. Rogues begins to protest but Doc shakes his head just a little at her and steps into her line of sight. Peeking around him, she sees John push himself into a sitting position and as predicted, throw his legs off the bed to stand unsteadily. Doc reaches out to help him but John slaps his hand away, "Don't touch me." John steadies himself on the edge of the bed, his shoulders stiff with fury. "Don't ever fucking touch me again."

Rogue looks away embarrassed and upset by John's out of control temper though Doc seems unperturbed.

"You can't heal if you can't rest."

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees John's hand move in a familiar gesture. If he was holding his lighter or wearing a wrist flint his hand would be full of fire right now. "Old man," he says in an icy cold voice, "don't ever-"

Rogue moves quietly to the stairs unable to listen the ugly threat she is sure is coming.

"Slinking away already?!" The voice whips past Doc, cracking across Rogue's back and drawing blood. She pauses with one shaking foot on the stairs and John pushes off the bed toward her, "Don't stop. Bobby's waiting!" He backhands the work tray out of his way, sending a tray with another syringe clattering to the floor. "I can't believe you stayed so long already- he must be _panting_ for it by now- no guy's ever waited so long for a fuck-"

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!" She screams, "There is no Bobby, you god damned fool!"


	17. Chapter 17

"the fire, a fire

you can only take what you can carry

a pulse, your pulse

it's the only thing i can remember

i break, you don't

i was always set to self-destruct though"

Snow Patrol -If there's a rocket, tie me to it

**A/N:** The end is near my friends. I can see it on the horizon in maybe three chapters and I'm like the guy at the Boston Marathon at the back of the pack, puking his guts out at the side of the road and then stumbling on, desperate for the finish line so it can just be over. I don't know if theirs anything worthwhile in here anymore but I love all of you and I want to thank you for your rabid support and handing me Gatorade etc.

**Chapter 16-**

"What," John says, in a voice as cold and toneless as a dead man's, "are you talking about?"

Standing on the stairs, Rogue is just far enough up to see the entire room laid out before her and John standing perfectly in the middle. "I'm not with Bobby. . ." she admits in a shaking voice as he stares at the far wall, showing her only his profile, "I broke it off with him before I ever came looking for you."

He is beside her, suddenly gripping her wrist and dragging her up the remaining stairs.

A voice cracks out behind and below them, "John-"

"Stay out of it, old man!" John snarls back down the stairs before pounding the door mechanism with one hand so that it cuts off Doc's sharp protest.

"John, you're hurting my arm-"

He ignores her, continuing to pull her through the empty shop toward the side door with a strength that contradicts his recent injury. The padlock on the door slows him not at all. Producing his lighter from somewhere with his free hand, he blasts the door open with enough force to pull one of the hinges out of the cement.

He must have had the lighter when he shouted at Doc earlier but had not used it. A little breath of relief sighs through Rogue when she realizes it.

John has her just on the outside of the door and into the alley when he lets go like he can't stand to touch her anymore. And Rogue stumbles from the sudden freedom.

"This is how it is." He tells her flatly, casting his lighter aside onto the grime of the alleyway like it doesn't matter. Rogue stares down at the little glinting it makes amid the rumpled paper and other detritus- what is happening?

What is happening?

John's voice coalesces out of the air, "You're going to touch me. Right now. And you're not going to let go for anything."

She stares at him for a moment before the words sink in. When they reach her, she recoils instinctively trying to pull free of his grip, "No!" Shaking her head in violent denial, she refuses, still pulling futilely at her arm, "You'll die- _I'll_ _kill_ _you_." Tears are slipping down her cheeks which she can't feel through her horror, "No. You're too weak-" She begs- hears herself begging and doesn't care. He can't make her do this. Not this.

"That's why you won't hurt me." He's holding her eyes but for once he's not _just_ angry. There's something else in him that she recognizes though she's hardly ever seen it before. Something that might be vulnerable. Though his voice is not gentle when he insists, "Touch me right now or I'm leaving. I'll walk away and never come back-"

The threat stops her breathing. He can't leave. He can't just disappear-

"Please. . . " He asks, just once and raises his hand between them- his pale naked hand.

And it's the please that coaxes her forward despite her unsteady legs, that and the hand that he offers her that doesn't shake at all. Against her will, she takes one step forward unable to deny his soft hungry plea.

She watches her stiff fingers fumble with the gloves as she pulls them off and her hands seem farther away than usual. Everything seems farther away. Using her left glove, she dries her tears roughly before dropping it on the ground. It falls across John's lighter, unnoticed.

"We shouldn't do this." She says to the ground with no conviction, when the second glove is off and she stands naked in the alleyway.

"You won't hurt me"

"How do you know?"

"I know you."

Her heart is frozen, cold and locked inside.

She should run. She should run. It would be better for everyone. Keep them safe.

All she had ever done was wound and destroy. Look at how she had hurt him already.

But John knows her, an idea both terrifying and seductive. He sees her like Bobby never could -like she had never let Bobby see her- way down deep to the place she fights to keep everyone out. Her gloves are off now and she is finally too weary to run. And she realizes she doesn't want to. Not anymore.

He had promised that she wouldn't hurt him. She's not so sure.

But maybe . . . maybe this first time she doesn't have to trust herself.

Maybe she just has to trust him.

She doesn't take his offered hand; instead she steps past it and into him, sliding her arms around his waist so they are tucked close together. John folds his arms around her in turn and his breath twines into her hair.

Lowering her head to rest on his shoulder, her cheek presses against his neck.

It begins.

_Her mother is still lying on the floor clutching her finger when her father returns. He swings the screen door to the kitchen open and pauses at the threshold, glancing down at his wife and her tear-pale face._

"_Linda? What-" He turns toward Marie, "What did you do?" He demands and Marie can see the fear there. The disgust. _

"I'm sorry_," She whispers, her back pressed against the kitchen wall as she tries to retreat as far away from her mother's fear as she can, "_I'm sorry_-" _

_He turns away from her as though he can no longer stand to touch her with even his eyes and hurries forward to help her mother off the floor. _

"_I didn't mean too-"_

"_I don't care," Her father snaps back, "Do you know what you've cost this family? You're mothers already lost her job-"_

_No more teaching. Three days after they took David to the hospital, the principal had called Marie's mother into his office to tell her that budget cuts were forcing him to let go of a teacher. And she was it. _

_She loved being a teacher. Had put herself through college as a waitress at a dinner, working nights and studying during the day so she could be paid virtually no money to stumble into a classroom at dawn. And she had loved it. _

"_I could lose my job. Who'll pay the mortgage? The car payment?"_

_Marie turns to her mother, expecting to see her mouth opened to protest or argue but instead her face is turned away._

"_We're not welcome at church-"_

"_That's not my fault-"_

"_Everything is your fault!" _

"_Aaron-" Her mother puts a weak hand on her husbands arm but it's too late. This had been building for a week. A week where their tidy little life had crumbled to pieces around them. Because of Marie. _

"_How could you do this to us?" He screams at her. _

_And he lashes out. _

_The contact is brief. Just long enough for the back of his hand to strike her cheek but they both fall. _

_Rogue with blood in her mouth and her father gasping desperately for breath, veins standing out in agony against his face. _

Rogue is shaking in John's arms, her tears soaking into the material of his shirt, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I never meant to. I never meant to-"

He tightens his grip on her, pressing his cheek into her hair. His arm is wrapped around her back, one hand tangled in her hair at the nape of her neck, another arm around her waist. He is all made of muscle and bone and sinew; there's no softness in his body but there is comfort in the fervency of his embrace. He doesn't tell her it's alright.

But he gives her a gift, letting something fall open inside of him.

_John lies prone on the linoleum floor, his jaw throbbing. He should know by now not to answer back but even at ten years old, it's not in him to fake meekness. His blood pounds through him and he throws his head back to snarl another foolish reply but-_

_From his place on the floor, John can see the flame under the burner on the propane stove. The fire is high temperature blue with a seeded white middle, sometimes moving to a golden orange. Standing above him, he can see his father, his mouth working angrily to shape ugly twisted words John can't hear- he can't hear anything but the strange furious singing flooding his ears. A siren call both enticing and filling, sweet and fierce. _

_A boot catches him in the side. When he rolls, a second kick catches him in the gut. The pain is sharp, metallic like the taste of the blood in his mouth. Anger floods through him with the pain, burning like a fire. He bites his lip against the sound that wants to escape his mouth. The fire is growling and singing, shouting and crying and calling to him. He stares at the flame- it flickers wildly. Its' song swells with his anger. _

_The boot pulls back once more . . . and the stove bursts into flame. _

_It is the most beautiful thing John has ever seen. _

The walls Rogue had thought were so well constructed have turned to sand. They have washed away, at first by inches underneath the onslaught of John's persistence and rage and then in great collapsing pieces as she sat by Johns' bedside. But even as she falls to pieces she is holding him together, "He didn't know." She tells him. "He couldn't see how special you are-"

We were all blind, her voice murmurs to him, inside. Rogue slides her cheekbone along his brow, lips tracing kisses at his hairline. He is so beautiful.

"Ah-" She convulses a little in his arms, another memory rushing up toward the surface.

"_Hey- has anyone seen John?"_

"_Pyro? Where the hell is he?"_

"_He's . . . with Magneto." _

_There was a brief quiet moment in the frenzy. Hands paused on seats belts and even _

_Logan looked troubled before shaking off the quiet. _

_Then everyone was moving again, throwing John away in their thoughts, writing him off. _

_Except for Bobby who looked as stunned as Rogue felt. John was gone. _

_In the ensuing minutes- the frantic following minutes, there was hardly time to think about it. There was something wrong with the jet. The water was coming._

_But the phrase kept washing through her head- John is gone. _

_Rogue felt . . . empty. John is gone. _

_Cyclops was shouting, thrashing in Logan's grip like a wounded animal. There were real tears on Logan's face. He loved Dr. Grey. _

_And now she was gone. _

_John is gone._

_It actually matters and she feels grieved and confused and angry. How could John be gone? How could so many things change so fast?_

_He left an unexpected hole in the world behind him. _

_Where he used to sit, where he used to sleep- Rogue found herself walking around the spot he used to stand beside the basketball court like there was an actual hole in the ground she might fall into. _

_She moved through her classes, training, talking to Jubilee, chastely holding Bobby's hand with the sensation that she was standing on the edge of a cliff. _

_And always something would push her off . . . and the pain would hit._

_She would say something to Bobby and pause just a second, expecting John to break in with something sarcastic. Then she would remember. _

_John is gone. _

_And she would wonder if he was okay. The thought of Magneto- all those angry violent people John had jumped in with-_

_It would wake her up sometimes. Sometimes, in the middle of the night she would stare up at the ceiling, unable to get warm _knowing_ he was cold and damp somewhere. _

_Sometimes she would feel a stab of pain, across her ribs, over her eye that had nothing to do with the danger room and she would think of John. Her breath would strain and heave in her chest. _

_John is gone, she would remind herself. _

Somehow they have worked their way to the wall of the alley. John has her body pinned between him and the gritty cement. He isn't exactly gentle anymore or patient. He opens his mouth hungrily, demanding that she open hers and she responds. She can taste his eager impatience and glancing with surprising ease into his head she finds that it is the result of waiting- waiting since the day he had met her for her to realize what he had known all along- that their power is just alike. Hungry.

But unlike her, he is in control. Always.

"How?" she whispers to him.

John slides his palms upward to frame her face with his hands and leans his forehead against hers, "You can't be afraid." He explains, kissing her again. Unable to stop, "When you're afraid, it takes over to protect you."

Can that be true? She thinks back over all the times it had ever gone bad- which was every time. Yes, that was how it always started. She would get scared and . . . the power would rise up.

But this time, finally, she isn't afraid. His kisses feel like the best part of falling.

"You get so close-" she whispers into his skin, "and I shove you away. Why do you keep coming back?"

"I don't know," He answers and then, "Because I want to."

_The moon is high when he finds his way back through the woods to the clearing. She won't be there, he knows. When he opens the door, her bag will be gone. She will have left nothing behind to remind him that she was ever there- not her scent, not her footprint in the sand by the door, not her dishes in the sink. _

_She'll run just like she always has. _

_He pauses when he puts his hand on the doorknob, steeling himself for a moment to face the inevitable emptiness and pretends it's just to catch his breath. But when he lets himself back in, her duffel is still slumped against the wall. _

_There's a pressure in his chest when he looks at it. _

_It doesn't mean anything, he tells himself brutally. Stepping a little farther inside, his eyes adjust to the soft darkness between the moonlight at the window and, he sees the tub on the floor trembling full of water. _

_She took a bath. _

_She had sat in his kitchen naked, probably shivering in the cooling water. . . _

_His hands are shaking when he drags the tub over to the door and across the threshold where he tips it off the porch to hear the water empty. He leaves it upside down so the last droplets can slip out. _

_Facing the empty hallway, he pauses, unable to go forward or back. _

_Remember the alley. A voice in his head reminds him. Remember how tightly she held onto your jacket, remember how she slid her fingers into your hair, the way she opened her mouth – yes. He had never forgotten. _

_Now, remember how she ran. _

_She'll run again. _

_You can't trust her. You can't trust anyone. _

_He makes his weary way down the hall, the long hike and long day finally catching up to him and he pushes his door open roughly with one elbow. _

_Rogue is in his bed. _

_He slides down the wall beside the door to crouch on his heels. Leaning his head back, the curve of his skull taps the wall and he stares at the dark ceiling. When he looks back, she is still there. _

_The conflicting sensations are impossible to reconcile. He wants to fall all over her, strip their clothes away and bury himself in her. He is desperately hard and his heart beats so fiercely it's difficult to maintain his balance. Putting one fist onto the floor, he lets his shuddering breath thrum through him. _

_He also wants to stay exactly where he is and just watch her forever. She's so beautiful. _

_She's so beautiful it makes him ashamed. His life has been full of ugly irredeemable moments. Things she should never have to touch but that live inside of him still. _

_Stirring a little in her sleep, her features crease with sorrow and he is at her side immediately, brushing a lock of hair away from her eyes that have blossomed open. _

_Seeing him, she smiles. _

_Before her eyes close again. _

_He stays by her bedside watching her sleep for hours, making sure he is up and gone long before she wakes. _

_It becomes a habit. _

_Even as he loathes himself for it, he still stands outside her door, listening for her almost imperceptible breathing to become deep and even. And when he's finally sure she's asleep he crouches by the door once again until he's sure she won't wake and then he crosses the floor to her bedside, watching. Sometimes he goes so far as to rest his cheek on her bed. _

_What is he doing?_

_He has to send her away. _

_He should kill her. _

_It's pathetic. He's pathetic. _

_But still he watches. _

Rogue has fallen deeper into him than ever before. She feels the peace the drowning must know when they give up the fight for air. Sinking, sinking . . . her limbs heavy, her hair like a cloud . . . and she's so warm, cradled by him.

But as she floats down she can see something- a hard darkness that writhes and snaps. It's a lattice of dark lines like a web wrapped around a radiant globe, turning and angry.

It's a cage.

What has John caged inside of him?


	18. Chapter 18

A/N: Hah! I'm not dead! Seriously, thanks for sticking with me. We're almost there.

**Chapter 18**

Rogue is freefalling now- a jumper without a parachute and the dark cage flies upwards toward her. She hits it- lands on it really, clinging to the network of lines as cold as black ice but there is no sensation of impact. The light from the caged thing washes over her face, warm almost hot. A memory, she wonders. Something even John won't touch? But why is it so bright? She doesn't feel afraid . . . stretching out she tries to reach through the dark web holding the light back, the cold crisscrossing her chest, and she can see the light strain toward her in response but she still can't touch it. The net is steely and unyielding, keeping her from the thing she seeks. Rogue thumps it with one fist and feels it clang a little like cheep steel.

"Let me in!" she demands striking it again, furious to be kept from the light. The vibration from the blow dies quickly under her other hand. The light turns, flaring for a moment. As though it is excited.

It swells up and there is a smell- like toasted marshmallows maybe. Rogue lies on her belly, stretching both of her hands out to it through the net but still can't reach. She grabs the edge of a strand, wrapping her hands around it to shake it like a prisoner in a movie. "Let go!" She continues shaking "Let go!"

The light swells up again and she reaches down hastily- there are just inches between her fingertips and the globe as she strains but the glow retreats just like before. She screams with frustration, pounding both fists down on the cage, even kicking with her feet, until the cage is ringing from the blows and the light breathes out, expanding with every moment of contact. "Now," She breathes, reaching down again and her fingers just brush the orb.

The world explodes into white.

"_Sit down, John" The bald guy, the _professor_, is still using his name- like they know each other or something, like they're friends. It gets under John's skin but he sits anyway,_ _sprawled across his chair in a posture that announces he holds the whole world in contempt. He glares into the middle distance and demands, "What do you want?"_

_The obvious hostility of his posture doesn't seem to bother the old guy- he smiles gently, _"None of the things you think." _Says a voice in John's head. _

_The young mutant sits up abruptly. '_What the hell is this_?' He thinks. _

"_Don't you mean, 'What the hell am _I_?' I'm a mutant like you. I-"_

"_Stay out of my head!" The wash of fury is scalding. The man in the wheelchair actually recoils a little, the wheels of his chair turning back a few centimeters. _

"_You don't know me." John insists coldly. _

_The Professor recovers his composure, taking a breath and letting it out again, "I'm sure you're tired from your ordeal tonight but there are a few things I would like to discuss with you before you go to your room."_

"_My room?" _

"_Yes. After the unfortunate incident in the cells, I could only get the judge to release you into my custody or into the foster care system. You're lucky you're not older. He would have liked to send you straight to jail."_

_John doesn't answer. He'll go to his 'room' and then he'll be out the door or the window. Whatever's closer. _

"_I would like to discuss your power, John. How old were you when it first manifested?"_

"_Screw you, baldy." John answers, standing to go-_

_But he is still sitting in the chair. He struggles frantically and finds himself unable to move so much as an eyelid. _

"_Answer me, John." A voice commands softly and John can hear his voice pour out the whole story- the beating and the stove, the rage and comfort. _

"_How close are you to making the fire?" _

"_Close," He answers softly, a smile wanting to form on his frozen face, "I can almost see how it happens. I just need a little more time. . ."_

_There is a long moment of silence and suddenly John is slammed back into his chair as some force rips through his mind, sifting through his experience, pulling up memories and discarding them, taking the measure of his soul. The touch burns everywhere it reaches but the fire isn't comforting like what he usually knows. It's like acid, cauterizing and scarring what it passes over. Things are slipping from him; John can feel knowledge draining away, walled off where he can't touch it. _

_Inside, he screams and screams. _

Rogue's mouth is pressed against John's collarbone and open as though to scream too but no sound comes out. Instead her mouth fills with the briny taste of tears. Drops and rivers and waterfalls of fury and pain for John wash down her face.

How could the Professor do that? How could he steal that from John? It was what he was always _meant_ to be-

The cage- the cage has to _go_.

She kisses John, this time slowly and deliberately, opening her mouth so he can taste her tears as well. She presses _him_ back against the wall and reaches under his shirt, flattening her palms against the smooth skin. Her fingers pass over the puckered mark left on his shoulder. Like the cage, she thinks, a puckered scar around his heart. Under her hands it's as though she can see the cage turning in his chest, strangling the light in him like a painting of the Madonna her heart on fire. Rogue feels her own power, not ripping or clawing through her but flowing. Like him, fire runs under her skin.

"We're just alike," She breathes into the skin under his jaw and he groans, his head falling back though his hands on her hips don't loosen. Rogue knows what she has to do. She reaches through his chest, down under his skin and her hands wrap around the cage. Her fingers slide into the holes between the strands, her grip tight as stone. John stiffens under her hands but seems helpless to resist whatever she is doing. Breathing deeply, Rogue marshals the power under her skin. Then she pulls her hands apart with all her might and rips the cage to pieces. As the cage shatters under the force of her fury, the memory and caged power explodes outward and he whimpers.

Rogue wraps her arms around John as tightly as she can- as though she can hold him together. When his legs give out, she struggles to keep them both upright. John shakes, sharp tremors wracking through him under the onslaught and it takes all of Rogue's strength to keep him pressed against the wall. "It's okay," She promises him over and over again, "It'll be over soon. It'll be over soon."

Finally, the trembling subsides. Propped against the wall, with their arms around each other, they pant, aching and sweat soaked. John's eyes are still closed and Rogue reaches out to run her fingertips over his cheek and down his jaw. He smiles unsteadily without opening his eyes and she tilts his head down toward her face to press one soft kiss to his lips.

When he opens his eyes, they can both see it- the world is made of fire. Like that time outside the clinic in Hartford, Rogue can sense the fire waiting all around them for the chance to bloom. It's a testament to John's will that he can ever resist the urge to bring it forth. To her, seeing the world through the lens of his power, fire is begging to be born everywhere. His lighter on the pavement is like a star. . .

"Try," She says to him.

His hand is shaking when he reaches out toward his lighter, his fingers crooked just a little. He flicks his fingers and the fire soars free, the lighter disintegrating in the intense heat.

It doesn't matter. He will never need it again.

A small sound escape John's throat and he gestures again and again and the fire blooms- across the alley and then at their feet. The fire bursts over them like a flower rushing up to the sun. They stand in the heart of flame, a singing column of heat and light. Rogue pulls back away from John for a moment, glancing around with wonder at the fire that encases them. She puts her hand out, turning it in the light to watch the flames lick at her palm.

The fire is spreading, hopping from one source of fuel to another across the alleyway. Catching the edge of a pool of alcohol and motor oil, the fire moves sideways, flaring up. The dumpster has caught fire now. The asphalt under their feet has begun to crack apart from the heat.

"More," Rogue whispers and John pours power into the fire; lets the wildness fill them.

Fire slips down his cheeks.

And John falls to his knees. When he hits the ground, Rogue can feel the earth shake. He wraps his arms around her waist and presses his face against her stomach while the fire sings like angels around them. With the water from his tears, Rogue can also feel his mouth shaping words. Her heart constricts like a closing fist when she finally makes them out.

Through his sobs he repeats two words over and over, "_Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you_-"


	19. Chapter 19

"I'm aware what the rules are

But you know that I will run

You know that I will follow you

Over silvery hills, through the solar fields

You know that I will follow you." 1,000 Oceans

–Tori Amos

**A/N:** Thanks for sticking with this and for all your encouragement and suggestions. I'm so glad and grateful that you have enjoyed reading it like I've enjoyed writing it. I feel such a ridiculous warmth for all of you people out there in the ether. Though we will never meet- Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

**Chapter 19-**

A blast of cold hammers them from behind, ripping the fire away and casting them apart from each other.

The fire- the flowering of John's power dies abruptly and Rogue's chest echoes hollowly where it's wildness had surged through her.

Struggling to stand, a strong familiar hand wraps around her arm, pulling her to her feet. Across the alley, Bobby holds his hand palm out and John staggers under the ice that pours out of it. He fights his way to one knee and holds his own hand out like a shield to call up the fire when Bobby steps closer and the cold explodes over John, stronger than before. He falls again.

"Stop!" Rogue screams. She can feel John weakening. Drained and wavering- he is still fragile from his injury and from the emergence of this new facet of his power. But still he tries to push himself up with one hand as Bobby mercilessly pounds him across the shoulders. "Stop it! _You're hurting him! Stop_!"

Bobby doesn't hear or doesn't care. He watches John writhe under the cold with all the expression a man might give a fish on a hook.

Rogue tries to rush forward but Logan is still holding her, "Let go!" She demands, wrenching at her arm.

"Marie-" Logan shakes her, pulling her around to face him, trying to meet her eyes.

"Let go!" She repeats but his confusion is clear in the wrinkle between his eyebrows. He refuses to let go. Glancing over her shoulder, Rogue can see John's shoulders bowed under Bobby's assault, palms pressed into the rough asphalt, his head hanging low. There's just no time.

"I'm sorry, Logan." She sees the understanding in his eyes before she presses her free hand to his face. Rogue doesn't bother with finesse; she drags as much energy out of him as quickly as she can and he drops like a stone.

Hitting Bobby low and hard, Rogue tackles him around the middle, knocking him off his feet. With a quick powerful twist, he reverses their positions. Pinning her underneath him, one hand holds her down as the other draws back to punch when he finally recognizes her face, "Rogue?" Bobby asks, confused and she takes advantage of his hesitation, lunging toward the only skin he has left uncovered- his face.

He slaps her hand away, slamming her wrist into the ground and trapping it there, "Rogue! What's wrong with you?"

"Let me go!" She fights his hold wildly.

"What did he do to you?" Bobby whispers in horror as he stares down at her like she's become a rabid stranger. For a moment, Rogue stops struggling. "Marie," Bobby pushes the tangled hair out of her face, "We were so worried-"

A hand grabs Bobby by the hair and drags him backwards off of Rogue. Tossing Bobby onto the ground, John delivers a vicious unsteady punch that catches the other man full in the face. Blood washes over the pavement.

Now pinning Bobby down, John rains blows down on the other mutant. Again. And again.

Stumbling forward, Rogue grabs his arm, "That's enough-" She pleads, "John! That's enough!" It's almost as though he doesn't know how to stop.

A set of claws catches the light and Rogue moves just fast enough to take the blow instead of John. The adamantium slicing into her arm so cleanly, she hardly feels any pain until the blades catch bone.

The claws disappear in an instant and Logan's eyes stretch wide in dismay, "Marie-"

Stillness reigns suddenly and three pairs of shocked eyes gaze at her.

Instinct pushes Rogue to clutch at the wound but her hand flinches away before she can touch the bloody mess. The flesh of her upper arm has been sliced into strips right down to the bone. Her blood burns as it pours across the unblemished skin of her forearm and unto the ground. When her knees give way and she falls, the impact rattles her teeth. John is at her side in an instant, one hand steady on her back as he stares at the injury.

"Rogue-" Logan moves towards her and Pyro slaps him away with a wave of fire.

"Stay away from her!" John snarls, crouched over Rouge.

His burned skin re-growing as they watch, Logan pushes himself away from the wall and back to his feet, "You're really starting to piss me off, kid."

Clutching John's arm, Rogue's vision darkens at the edges.

He rips his eyes away from Logan to glance at her. In that moment of distraction, the blades leap through Wolverine's skin and his muscles bunch to spring-

The alleyway fills with a brilliant golden light that is both soft and warm and just a little sharp like rubbing cat's fur until a spark forms. It glows so bright everyone shades their eyes and a voice observes, "That's enough, children."

Stepping out of the ruined hole where his alleyway door used to be, Doc crosses the pavement quickly. He drops to his knees beside Rogue who recoils instinctively. Holding her with his calm steady gaze, the older man smiles gently, "Let me take a look at that, Marie." He nods toward her mangled arm.

Behind him, Logan looks stunned, "Now just wait a minute, Bub-"

Over his shoulder, Doc glares sharply at Logan, "Are you a doctor? Then shut up and stay out of my way." He takes Rogues hand and grunts in surprise as the drain starts.

Rogue feels the golden light of his power wash up her arm. Pain evaporating, the muscles knit back together, blood vessels leaping over the gaps and reforming to pump healing blood through the new tissue. The sensation is slower and warmer than what she had felt from Logan's healing. It's gentler too, erasing pain instead of forcing her to endure the discomfort of a long recovery compressed into a few moments.

Grateful, Marie smiles up at Doc and his eyes fall to where she is still clinging to his fingers as his veins rise to the skin, crawling up his arm, "A little help here, John?" He requests softly and the young man hurries forward to help him pry his fingers loose from Rogue's.

"I'm sorry-"

Doc waves her apology away, "No matter." Sitting back heavily onto his heels, his breath comes raspy in his throat, "Just give me a second and I'll take a look at him," He nods toward Bobby as the young man covers his bloody nose and mouth with one hand and he watches everything through wild eyes.

Studying Rogue, John touches her shoulder gently, "You okay?"

She gives him a small reassuring smile.

"_What in the hell is going on!_" Logan roars and everyone else jumps. "_Who the hell are you?"_ He demands to Doc, then he jerks his head toward John though he is looking at Rogue, "_And what are you doing with him?"_

John raises one eyebrow sardonically then glances at Rogue . . . who is staring down at the tips of her boots.

When she doesn't answer Logan right away, all expression slips off John's face and his posture grows stiff, "So, tell him, _Marie_- What are you doing with me?"

Again everyone is watching her- even Doc has focused his soft gaze to her. Rogue turns to John, her eyes pleading but his expression has settled stark and cold across his face. How can she explain?

Frustration tightens her voice, "You don't understand. _Logan-" _Glancing around like she is trying to find the words, her eyes land on Bobby. Bobby with the blood covering his chin and the resentment and confusion clear on his face. Bobby who said he never wanted her to change and was still afraid to touch her.

Mute and furious, John is still crouched beside her, still close enough to touch.

Raising her chin, Rogue meets Bobby and Logan's eyes in turn, "I came to John." Pyro's head snaps up and she keeps her eyes steady on him as she continues, "I needed someone- no, I needed _John_ to teach me-"

"Teach you what?" Logan demands.

"This." Reaching out, Rogue offers her hand and John slides his fingers into hers without hesitation. Bobby makes a strained sound.

Eyes falling to their joined hands, a muscle in Logan's jaw works fiercely. He jerks his head toward the end of the alley, "Let's talk, kid." He walks away, back stiff.

When she struggles to get to her feet, John rises as well, dragging them both up using the wall for leverage. When she starts to follow Logan, John warns, "Rogue-"

She runs a soothing hand across his cheek, a deep part of her wondering at her skin on his, "It's okay." She explains, before trailing unsteadily after Wolverine.

Leaning against the brick at the end of the alley, Logan lights one of his short cigars and regards her through a cloud of smoke as she sways in front of him, "Is this for real?"

Taking a steadying breath, Marie reaches out and lays her palm against his forearm.

He stares down at the small pale hand against his ruddy skin. When nothing happens, he demands, "How?"

A strange breathy laugh escapes Marie and her fingers fall away, "Practice,"

"_Practice?_ Why didn't the professor-"

Rogue's expression darkens, "I'm not sure the professor wanted me to control it."

Logan chews the cigar thoughtfully. Then he notes, "He's Brotherhood, you know. The same people who tied you to a machine that was going to kill you."

Shaking her head, Rogue answers, "No. He's John. And I'm Marie."

Seeing the doubt in his eyes still, Rogue reaches out to grasp his hand with both of hers, one thumb sliding between his knuckles where the blades come out, "You said you were my friend once." She tugs gently on his fingers, "Please, understand this. Now. I need him."

The silence lays over them, heavy like water as he hunts her eyes for something . . .

Sighing, Logan's shoulders slump in resignation. Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out his keys, removing a separate ring holding two slices of metal. "Here," He offers them to her.

"What-" Rogue frowns in confusion, refusing the gift automatically, but he takes her wrist and presses the keys into her palm.

"You might want to head north for a while." He suggests, "Maybe take a trip you always meant to take. Maybe stop in Vancouver at a storage facility called Bobby Jack's and take a look at what's in unit number 43."

She searches his face, rugged and frightening to everyone but her. Somehow, she has always known she could trust him. Even now she isn't sure why.

So she asks, "Why?"

"'Cause, I'm your friend, kid."

Logan disentangles her arms from around his neck a moment later, "You're gonna give the firebug the wrong idea," he observes, nodding at John watching discreetly from a few feet away.

Turning, Rogue's smile is brilliant as she holds her hands out and John's stiff posture relaxes as he moves to take them.

"No!" Bobby's protest cuts across the alley and he stumbles toward them, shaking off Doc's restraining hand, "_Marie_-" His eyes, his familiar face begs her- Tell me this is some kind of joke. Somewhere under her ribs, Rogue can still feel him. Like the others, she will live with the knowledge of him, probably for the rest of her life. But it doesn't have to mean anything.

"I don't love you anymore." Rogue tells him calmly, her hand tightening around John's, "And I'm not sure you ever loved me."

"Marie-" Bobby insists.

"Christ, Iceman, it's over-" Logan's voice sounds disgusted behind them.

"Go home, Bobby." Rogue answers, "I'm sure Kitty's waiting."

For a second, he seems like he might accept it. His eyes fall closed and Rogue nods in relief but when he opens them again, he looks as immovable as rock. He opens his mouth to protest again- and crumples to the ground.

Toeing the young mans still form, Doc murmurs, "Boy needs to learn when to let go."

John laughs softly.

Wolverine gives them both a shocked look then with a shrug, nods his agreement. Crossing the alley, he bends over to sling Bobby up onto his shoulder. "Call me when you get there," He instructs Rogue.

"Okay."

He exchanges a nod with Doc and walks away, hauling the unconscious Bobby like a sack of grain.

When they are out of sight, John turns toward Marie, "What now?"

Rogue slides her arms around him, pulling him as close as she can. Her mouth moves over his, tasting the future there. When they part finally, she asks, "Have you ever been to Alaska?"


End file.
